Remove Punctuation
Strip punctuation and symbols from any text in one click. Remove commas, periods, quotes, brackets, and other marks while keeping your words and spacing intact. Optionally remove numbers too for clean, plain text.
Whether you call it remove punctuation or strip punctuation, this free tool handles it instantly in your browser.
Options
Example usage
Example input
Hello, World! How's it going?
Example output
Hello World Hows it going
Batch Processing
Enter multiple inputs, one per line. Each line will be processed separately.
Why this tool?
Everything runs right in your browser — no uploads, no sign-up, no waiting. Your text never leaves your device.
Quick tips
- •Outputs update live as you type.
- •Use the sticky copy button to grab results quickly.
- •Bookmark this page for fast access.
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How it works
- Paste the text you want to clean.
- All punctuation marks and symbols are removed automatically.
- Words and spacing are preserved so the result stays readable.
Use cases
Why strip punctuation at all?
Punctuation is essential for reading and often fatal for matching. Text analysis is the biggest consumer of punctuation-free text: before you can count word frequencies, a tokenizer must decide whether "don't", "dont", and "don't," are one word or three. Search indexes normalize punctuation away for the same reason, which is why searching for "OBrien" can still find "O'Brien".
The other big use is generating safe values from human text. Filenames reject characters like : and /, URLs need percent-encoding for most punctuation, and CSV files break when a value contains an unescaped comma or quote. Stripping punctuation is often the quickest path to a value that survives whatever comes next.
What counts as punctuation — and what this removes
Unicode separates punctuation (periods, commas, quotes, brackets, dashes) from symbols (currency signs, math operators, arrows). This tool removes both, keeping letters, numbers, and spacing, and then tidies the gaps that removal leaves behind so you do not end up with double spaces where a comma used to be. The optional numbers switch is there for text analysis, where digits usually add noise rather than meaning.
One nuance worth knowing: curly quotes and apostrophes are different characters from their straight counterparts, and both are removed here. That matters because "don't" with a typographic apostrophe (U+2019) and "don't" with a straight one are different strings to a computer — stripping both is often the only way to get them to agree. For URL-safe output specifically, our Slug Generator handles punctuation, accents, and spacing in one pass.
Cleanup
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Browse every tool for this kind of task, along with helpful guides that show you how to get the most out of them.
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FAQ
What does the remove punctuation tool remove?
It removes punctuation marks and symbols such as periods, commas, quotes, brackets, dashes, and currency or math symbols, while keeping letters, numbers, and spaces.
Can it remove numbers as well?
Yes. Turn on "Also remove numbers" to strip digits in addition to punctuation, leaving only letters and spaces.
Does it keep my line breaks?
Yes. Line breaks and word spacing are preserved; only punctuation and symbols are removed, and extra spaces are tidied up.