How to remove punctuation from text
- Paste your text into Input. The punctuation is removed as you type.
- Leave Keep apostrophes on so words like don't and it's stay readable, or turn it off to remove apostrophes too.
- Copy or download the result. The line under the boxes shows how many characters were removed.
When removing punctuation helps
- Counting word frequency or building a word cloud, where “data,” and “data.” should count as the same word.
- Preparing text for search indexes, text analysis or a spreadsheet lookup that trips over stray quotes.
- Turning a headline into plain keywords or a hashtag.
- Matching product names across two lists when one list uses “Mr.” or “Ltd.” and the other doesn’t.
Your text stays in your browser the whole time, so it’s fine to paste emails, transcripts or customer data.
What goes and what stays
| Input | Output |
|---|---|
Yes, today. |
Yes today |
“hi” (note) |
hi note |
well-known |
wellknown |
#tag 50% $5 |
tag 50 5 |
don't (Keep apostrophes on) |
don't |
café |
café |
Numbers lose their formatting along with everything else, so 9 a.m. becomes “9 am” and 1,250.50 becomes “125050”. If the figures matter, pull them out first with Extract numbers.