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Remove Punctuation

Strip punctuation while keeping symbols, currency signs and emoji intact, with word-internal apostrophes and hyphens protected by their own toggles.

Privacy: your files never leave your device. All processing happens locally in your browser.

How to use

  1. 1.Paste the text you want to strip punctuation from.
  2. 2.Decide whether apostrophes in contractions and hyphens in compounds should survive, and whether removed marks should become spaces.
  3. 3.Click Remove punctuation, check the removal count, and copy the result.

About Remove Punctuation

Remove Punctuation strips commas, periods, quotes, brackets and every other punctuation mark from text while leaving everything that is not punctuation exactly where it was. That distinction is the whole point of the page. Unicode divides characters into categories, and punctuation is a different category from symbols: the dollar sign, the plus sign, angle brackets used as comparison operators, the copyright sign and every emoji are symbols, not punctuation. A cruder cleaner that removes both classes together turns $19.99 + tax into 1999 tax and eats the emoji from social media text. This tool removes exactly the seven Unicode punctuation subcategories, connector, dash, opening, closing, initial-quote, final-quote and other, and proves it by leaving $, +, =, ^, ©, currency signs and emoji untouched. If you want symbols gone too, the site's special characters remover does that job; this page exists for the cases where it must not happen.

Two protections handle the places where deleting punctuation damages actual words. The apostrophe toggle keeps the apostrophe in contractions and possessives, so don't stays don't instead of collapsing into dont; it recognises both the straight keyboard apostrophe and the curly typographic one, and it only protects an apostrophe with letters or digits on both sides, so quotation marks wrapped around a word are still removed. The hyphen toggle does the same for compound words: well-known and state-of-the-art keep their hyphens, and a date range like 2020-2021 survives, while a dash floating between spaces is still stripped. Both rules are word-internal by design, which has one honest consequence the page documents rather than hides: a trailing possessive like the dogs' bowls loses its apostrophe, because nothing follows it.

A third toggle replaces each removed mark with a space instead of deleting it outright. That matters when punctuation is doing the job of separating words: one,two,three collapses to onetwothree under plain deletion, but becomes one two three with replacement on, and the resulting runs of spaces are tidied to single spaces per line without ever merging lines together. Line breaks and tabs are never touched in either mode, so the shape of your text survives.

Every category claim behind the scope, which characters count as punctuation and which as symbols, was verified against the Unicode Character Database rather than assumed, including the full-width CJK marks like the ideographic full stop, so the tool behaves correctly on mixed-language text. The removal counter reports exactly how many code points were removed. The operation is idempotent, running the output through again changes nothing, and a one-million-character paste processes in a single linear pass in milliseconds. Everything runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded, stored or attached to an account.

One scope note deserves emphasis: stripping punctuation also strips decimal points and thousands separators, so 9.99 becomes 999. That is what removing punctuation means, and the page says so plainly, because a tool that silently second-guessed you about numbers would be worse than one that is predictable.

Methodology & sources

Remove exactly the seven Unicode punctuation subcategories, verified per character against the Unicode Character Database, with word-internal apostrophe and hyphen protection on their own toggles, optional space replacement with per-line tidying, and an exact per-code-point removal count.

Frequently asked questions

How is this different from the special characters remover?
This page removes only Unicode punctuation and proves that symbols survive: $, +, =, ©, currency signs and emoji all stay. The special characters remover strips symbols as well. Which one you want depends on whether $19.99 should keep its dollar sign.
Will contractions like don't be damaged?
Not if the apostrophe toggle is on. It protects straight and curly apostrophes that have letters or digits on both sides, so don't stays intact while quotes wrapped around a word are still removed. A trailing possessive like dogs' does lose its apostrophe, and the page says so.
What happens to numbers like 9.99 or 1,000?
Punctuation removal strips decimal points and thousands separators, so 9.99 becomes 999. That is inherent to the operation; use the replace-with-space option if you need the pieces kept apart.

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