Special Character Remover

Clean your text by removing symbols and non-alphanumeric characters

Input Text

0 Words | 0 Chars

Clean Alphanumeric Text

0 Symbols Removed

Letters/Numbers Preserved Mode

Reduce text to plain letters, numbers and spaces

Symbols creep into text from copied web pages, exports, usernames and form entries, and they can break file names, database keys, URLs and scripts. Special Character Remover applies a strict rule: whatever is not a basic English letter, a digit or whitespace gets deleted. It is a fast way to produce an alphanumeric version of any passage.

How it works in practice

Type or paste text into the Input Text box. The paste icon pulls from the clipboard and the bin icon clears the field. A counter shows words and characters.
Click Remove Special Characters. There are no options; the rule is always the same.
See the Clean Alphanumeric Text result. The Symbols Removed card shows how many characters were dropped, and Preserved Mode reads Letters/Numbers as a reminder of the rule.
Copy the result with the copy icon, or use the download icon to save clean-text.txt.

What is kept and what goes

Kept: uppercase and lowercase A to Z, digits 0 to 9, spaces, tabs and line breaks.
Removed: all punctuation, mathematical and currency symbols, brackets, quotes, underscores, hyphens and emojis.
Also removed: accented letters such as those in cafe or nino, and any letters from non-Latin scripts including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek and Chinese.

Use cases

Building a simple slug or identifier from a title before you swap the spaces for hyphens.
Sanitizing a list of names or codes prior to importing it into a legacy system that rejects symbols.
Removing hashtags, at signs and decoration from a social caption.
Stripping markup leftovers and separators from a pasted table or log line.

Read before you use it on real content

The rule is blunt, so double check the result. A price such as 4.99 turns into 499, an email address loses its at sign and dots, and a URL collapses into one run of letters. For names and text in languages other than English, the output will be missing characters, so this is not a good fit for multilingual content. The Symbols Removed number is the difference in text length, which means a character stored as two code units, such as many emojis, may be counted twice. Whitespace is left as it is, so use a spacing tool afterwards if you want it standardized. Everything happens as JavaScript in your browser page.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Are accented letters treated as special characters?

Yes. Only the basic letters A to Z, digits and whitespace are kept, so letters with accents and letters from non-Latin alphabets are removed along with symbols. Do not use this tool for text in languages that rely on those characters.

Are spaces and line breaks preserved?

Yes. Spaces, tabs and line breaks are counted as whitespace and left alone, so your layout stays the same. Only characters outside letters, digits and whitespace are deleted from the text.

Why is the removed count higher than the number of symbols I see?

The figure is the difference between the original and cleaned text length. Emojis and some other characters are stored as two code units each, so one visible character can count as two in that total.

Can I keep certain characters, like hyphens or underscores?

No. There are no settings, and hyphens, underscores and every other symbol are removed. If you need to keep some, remove the rest by another method or add the characters back manually after cleaning.

What happens to numbers with decimals or commas?

The decimal point and comma are removed, so 4.99 becomes 499 and 1,200 becomes 1200. Check any figures against the original before using the output, since the meaning of a number can change once its punctuation is gone.