Remove Punctuation

The tool deletes every symbol on a standard US keyboard that isn't a letter, digit or space. That is the 32 ASCII punctuation characters, which include the ones you'd expect, such as full stops, commas, question marks, exclamation marks, colons, semicolons, quotes, apostrophes, hyphens and brackets. It also includes symbols that are not punctuation in the grammar sense:

• $ % # @ & * + =
• / \ | ~ ^ and the backtick
• the underscore _
• < and >

Letters, digits, spaces, tabs and line breaks are kept.

Anything outside that basic keyboard set survives. This catches people out with text copied from word processors and websites, which often use typographic characters instead of the plain ones:

• curly quotes and apostrophes: “ ” ‘ ’
• en and em dashes: – —
• the single-character ellipsis …
• Spanish inverted marks ¿ ¡ and guillemets « »
• emoji and other symbols

So “curly quotes” — em dash… comes out unchanged, while the same text typed with straight quotes, two hyphens and three dots would be stripped. Accented letters such as é or ü are letters and are kept.

Because the symbols vanish without a space in their place, some text changes meaning:

A symbol that stood on its own between spaces leaves two spaces behind. He said: "no" - twice becomes He said no followed by two spaces and twice. Run the result through Remove Extra Spaces to collapse those gaps.

• Preparing text for a word list or word frequency count, where end. and end should be the same word.
• Cleaning keyword lists before you remove duplicates.
• Making file names or labels from free text, followed by a case converter.

If your text contains prices, times, emails or links, do this on a copy, or remove those parts first, since they can't be rebuilt from the output.