Punctuation Remover

What counts as punctuation?

This tool removes everything Unicode classifies as a punctuation mark: periods, commas, colons, semicolons, question and exclamation marks, straight and curly quotes, parentheses, brackets, braces, slashes, hyphens, en and em dashes, ellipsis characters, and underscores. It also covers marks other keyboards produce, from Spanish ¿ and ¡ to French « guillemets » and the fullwidth 。、！？ used in Chinese and Japanese.

Just as important is what it does not touch. Letters and digits always stay. Symbols such as $ € % + = and emoji are not punctuation, so this page leaves them alone; when you want those gone too, the special character remover is the wider net.

The apostrophe and hyphen problem

Stripping every mark sounds simple until you meet English contractions and compounds. Remove the apostrophe and don't becomes dont, it's collapses into its, and John's report reads like a plural. Remove the hyphen and well-known fuses into wellknown, while a date like 2026-07 turns into a meaningless 202607.

Sometimes that is exactly what you want: search engines and matching pipelines often normalize text this aggressively. But when a human still needs to read the result, switch to Keep apostrophes and hyphens. Every other mark is removed, straight and curly apostrophes survive inside words, and hyphenated compounds stay glued together. Pick per job; there is no single right answer.

How to remove punctuation from text

1. Paste your text into the box above. The character count updates as you paste.
2. Pick a mode. Remove all punctuation is on by default. Switch to Keep apostrophes and hyphens when contractions and compounds must stay readable, and leave the space cleanup ticked.
3. Click Remove Punctuation and copy the result. The counter tells you exactly how many marks were removed.

Before and after

The sample below mixes straight quotes, curly quotes, an ellipsis, hyphens, and the usual sentence marks:

Wait — really?! She said: “Don’t worry… it’s fine.”
The well-known fix: re-boot, re-try, repeat!

Wait really She said Dont worry its fine
The wellknown fix reboot retry repeat

Wait really She said Don’t worry it’s fine
The well-known fix re-boot re-try repeat

Both runs removed the quotes, dashes, colons, commas, and the ellipsis. The second kept the apostrophes and hyphens that carry meaning inside words, which is usually the better choice for prose.

After every run, the counter under the result reports exactly how many marks were removed. If that number looks far higher or lower than you expected, it is the fastest hint that the text contains marks you had not noticed, such as invisible typographic characters.

Punctuation in other languages

Copy text from a Spanish article and you inherit inverted marks, from a French one guillemets, from a German one „low-high" quotes, and from Chinese or Japanese the fullwidth 。、「」！？ set, which are different characters from their ASCII lookalikes. A cleanup that only knows the English keyboard misses most of them.

Because this punctuation remover matches by Unicode category instead of by a hand-typed list, all of those marks are recognized and removed in one pass, in any mix of languages. The words themselves, whatever the script, are never touched.

Cleaning keyword lists and datasets

The most common reason to remove punctuation in bulk is normalization: making two strings comparable. Keyword lists for ads or SEO where coffee, maker and coffee maker! should count as the same phrase; product feeds where titles arrive with decorative quotes; NLP preprocessing where tokens should not carry trailing commas; form answers that need to match a database value exactly.

For those jobs, run Remove all punctuation with the space cleanup on, and you get flat, comparable lines. If your list also carries blank lines, chain it with the empty line remover; each tool does one job and passes clean text to the next.

A quick checklist before you strip everything

Punctuation carries more data than it seems, so scan your text for four things before running Remove all. Decimals and dates: 3.14 becomes 314 and 2026-07-23 becomes 20260723 once their marks are gone; if those values matter, keep-mode preserves the hyphens but not the dots. Emails and URLs: @ symbols, dots, slashes, and colons are all punctuation, so sales@example.com collapses into salesexamplecom. When addresses or links must survive, clean the lines around them instead, or pull them out first.

Handles and hashtags: @textcleanly and #launch turn into plain words, which is sometimes the goal and sometimes a data loss. Meaningful underscores: file_name_v2 becomes filenamev2, so filenames and code identifiers usually belong outside this tool. None of this makes punctuation removal risky; it just rewards a two-second look at what is actually in the box before you flatten it.

Punctuation, symbols, and emoji are different

This page follows Unicode's punctuation categories. It removes sentence marks, brackets, quotes, dashes, slashes, and similar characters, but it leaves currency signs, mathematical operators, emoji, and most technical symbols alone. That distinction matters when you clean prices or labels: the period in 9.99 is punctuation and disappears, while the dollar sign is a symbol and stays. Use the special character remover when the goal is a stricter letters-and-numbers result.

The keep mode is deliberately narrow. It protects straight or curly apostrophes and common hyphens only when they sit between letters or numbers, so don't, re-entry, and 2026-07 remain readable. Decorative dashes at the beginning or end of a line are still removed. It does not preserve every possible connector used by every language, so multilingual text deserves a sample check before a large batch.

Review the result for the job that comes next

Search matching, deduplication, and simple word-frequency work often benefit from a consistent punctuation-free copy. Keep the original beside it, because normalization is a derived view, not a replacement for source data. For a spreadsheet, compare several rows that contain decimals, product codes, and addresses. For prose, read a full paragraph and make sure removed sentence boundaries do not merge words or change meaning.

Space cleanup runs after punctuation removal. It collapses repeated spaces inside each line and trims the edges, but it does not remove line breaks. Turn it off when character positions matter or when spacing is intentionally aligned. Turn it on for ordinary lists and sentences so a removed comma or dash does not leave visible gaps. The count reports punctuation marks removed; it does not claim that the transformed text is grammatically correct, valid for a database, or safe to use as code.

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