Punctuation Remover
Strip all periods, commas, and other punctuation marks from your text
Reduce text to words and numbers
Sometimes punctuation is in the way: preparing text for word-frequency counts, matching lyrics or quotes, building a keyword list, or feeding strings into a script that trips on symbols. Punctuation Remover deletes a fixed set of punctuation marks from what you paste and leaves letters, digits and spacing in place.
Steps
- Paste your text into the Original Text box, or use the paste icon to fill it from the clipboard. The counter above the box shows words and characters.
- Click Remove Punctuation. There are no settings to configure.
- The Punctuation-Free Result appears with a Marks Removed counter.
- Use the copy icon to copy the text, or the download icon to save no-punctuation.txt.
Exactly which characters are removed
The tool works from a specific list, and knowing it saves surprises. It deletes the following: period, comma, forward slash, hash, exclamation mark, dollar sign, percent sign, caret, ampersand, asterisk, semicolon, colon, curly braces, equals sign, hyphen, underscore, backtick, tilde and round parentheses.
It does not delete question marks, apostrophes, straight or curly quotation marks, square brackets, angle brackets, the at sign, plus sign, pipe or backslash. Typographic dashes and ellipsis characters are also left in place.
Where it is useful
- Getting clean word lists before counting how often each word appears.
- Comparing two versions of a sentence when only punctuation differs.
- Preparing captions or subtitles that a system wants without commas and full stops.
- Making text easier to read aloud in a speech or language exercise.
Side effects to expect
- Hyphens are deleted, so a compound such as well-known becomes wellknown, and words joined only by a slash or hyphen fuse together.
- Decimal points and thousands separators vanish, so 3.14 becomes 314 and 1,200 becomes 1200. Do not run figures through it.
- Email addresses and web links lose their dots, slashes and colons.
- Because apostrophes and question marks stay, contractions like don't are kept.
If you need a stricter clean-up that keeps only letters, digits and spaces, a special-character remover does that instead. This tool runs as JavaScript in your browser page.
A sensible habit is to skim the result once against the original, particularly for text with quotations, headings or lists. Because so few characters are touched, the output usually stays close to the source, but a single missing hyphen or slash can change how a compound word, a date such as 12/05/2024 or a file path reads, so it pays to confirm that nothing important was lost before you reuse the text elsewhere.
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