Remove Special Characters
Paste text and strip the symbols, punctuation, and emoji you do not want. Flip per-category toggles or pick a preset to decide exactly which characters count as special — letters of every language survive unless you choose ASCII only. Nothing is uploaded; your text never leaves your browser.
What is a special character?
Honestly, it depends on your definition. Broadly, a special character is anything that is not a plain letter, a digit, or a space: punctuation like periods, commas, and quotes; symbols like the at sign, hash, dollar, percent, and ampersand; brackets, math and currency signs; emoji; and the invisible control characters that ride along when you copy text. Because there is no single agreed list, a tool that strips one fixed set will always be wrong for half its users. That is exactly why this remover gives you toggles instead of one hard-coded rule, so you decide exactly which characters count as special before you clean a single line.
Removing special characters here runs entirely in your browser, so the text you paste never leaves your device. No account, no tracking, nothing uploaded — close the tab and it is gone. You can verify it yourself in the network panel of your browser: cleaning your text fires no request that carries it anywhere.
How to use it
- Paste or type your text into the top box.
- Tap a preset — such as Letters + numbers + spaces — or open Options and flip the Keep toggles yourself.
- Optionally list characters to always keep (a whitelist) or always remove (a blacklist).
- The clean result updates live as you type or change a toggle — there is no Submit button.
- Press Copy result, paste it where you need it, and leave.
The method behind it
The cleaner walks your text one code point at a time and classifies each
character by its real Unicode category rather than a crude
a–z0–9 filter. Letters are matched with the
Unicode letter property, so accented Latin, Chinese, Japanese, and Cyrillic
letters all count as letters and survive unless you turn on ASCII only.
Numbers, spaces, line breaks, basic punctuation, and other symbols are each
their own toggle. The order of operations is fixed and predictable: your
blacklist removes characters first, your whitelist then protects anything
you listed, emoji removal and ASCII-only run as their own passes, and
finally the category toggles keep or drop everything else. Iterating by
code point means emoji and other astral characters are never split in half.
Examples
- Caption with emoji —
Big sale!! 🎉🔥 #dealwith Remove emoji on becomesBig sale!! #deal; the hash and exclamation marks stay because emoji removal only targets emoji. - Name column for a CSV —
Ana-María (VIP)!with the Letters + numbers + spaces preset becomesAnaMaría VIP; the accented í survives. - ASCII only — smart quotes and accents in
“café”collapse to a plain subset, leavingcafwrapped in straight context once non-ASCII is stripped. - Keep a few symbols — put
@-_.in Always keep and an email or filename keeps those marks while the rest of the punctuation is removed.
Common use cases
- Cleaning a CSV or SQL import column — strip commas, quotes, and symbols that would break a field or delimiter.
- Making a safe filename or slug — keep letters, numbers, and a hyphen; drop everything else.
- Tidying copied AI or chat output — remove stray symbols and emoji that came along for the ride.
- Form fields and databases — produce plain text that passes strict validation rules.
- Captions and posts — strip emoji from a caption without disturbing the words or numbers.
Why use this one, and how it pairs with the toolkit
Most special-character removers are a single fixed button, or a doorway farm of near-identical pages that each strip one thing. This one is a single configurable page: per-category Keep toggles, an independent ASCII-only mode, Unicode-aware and CJK-safe emoji removal, plus a custom whitelist and blacklist — all with a live preview and no Submit button. It runs in your browser, asks for no account, and works instantly on mobile.
It also stays in its lane so it pairs well with the rest of the kit. If your text also has hard line breaks from a PDF or email, the Remove Line Breaks tool handles those; once the text is clean you can re-case it with the Case Converter, collapse extra spacing with the Text Formatter, or swap specific strings with Find and Replace.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a special character?
Anything outside letters, digits, and spaces is commonly called a special character — punctuation, symbols, brackets, currency and math signs, emoji, and invisible control characters. Because there is no single definition, this tool gives you toggles so you decide exactly which classes to remove instead of forcing one fixed rule.
How do I keep only letters and numbers?
Tap the Keep letters and numbers preset, or open Options and turn off Spaces, Punctuation, and Symbols while leaving Letters and Numbers on. Everything that is not a letter or a digit is stripped from the output instantly.
Will it delete my accented or Chinese and Japanese letters?
No. Keep letters keeps letters of every language and script, so accented Latin, Chinese, Japanese, and Cyrillic text all survive. The only exception is ASCII only mode, which intentionally strips every non-ASCII character — you choose that on purpose.
Can it remove emojis?
Yes. Turn on Remove emoji. It is Unicode-aware, so it removes pictographic emoji, skin-tone modifiers, and flag sequences without touching your numbers, the hash sign, or the asterisk, and without breaking Chinese or Japanese text.
How do I keep a few specific symbols like the at sign or hyphen?
Put those characters in the Always keep whitelist field. They survive even when their category is being removed. The companion Always remove field does the opposite — it deletes exactly the characters you list, no matter what.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. The cleanup runs entirely in your browser. Your text never leaves your device, there is no account, and nothing is logged or stored. You can confirm it in your browser network tab — no request carries your text.
Can I remove only punctuation but keep symbols?
Yes. Punctuation and other symbols are independent toggles, so you can strip commas, periods, and quotes while keeping the at sign, hash, and ampersand, or do the reverse. Mix and match the toggles to define what special means for your text.