Accent Remover
Remove accents and combining marks to get clean plain text.
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The Accent Remover strips diacritics such as acute accents, graves, umlauts, tildes and cedillas from text, turning "Café crème" into "Cafe creme" while leaving every other character in place. It is useful when a system, spreadsheet formula or file name only accepts plain Latin letters, and it also cleans up "Zalgo" text that has been buried under stacked combining marks.
How accents are removed
An accented letter like é can be stored as one character or as two: a plain "e" followed by a combining acute accent. The tool first applies Unicode NFKD normalisation, which splits accented letters into that base-plus-mark form, and then deletes every mark in the Combining Diacritical Marks block (U+0300 to U+036F), plus one extra combining sign often found in Zalgo text. What remains is the base letter.
| Input | Output |
|---|---|
| Café crème brûlée | Cafe creme brulee |
| José Muñoz, François | Jose Munoz, Francois |
| São Paulo, Zürich | Sao Paulo, Zurich |
| Tiếng Việt | Tieng Viet |
| Ångström, İstanbul | Angstrom, Istanbul |
Letters that stay unchanged
Some characters look accented but are separate letters in Unicode, with no base-plus-mark form. These pass through untouched:
- ß (German sharp s), Æ and Œ ligature letters
- Ø (Danish and Norwegian), Ł (Polish), Đ (Vietnamese and Croatian)
So "Łódź, Straße" becomes "Łodz, Straße". If you need pure ASCII, follow up with Find and Replace using the usual transliterations: ß to ss, Æ to AE, Ø to O, Ł to L.
Hindi, Tamil and other Indic scripts are not affected. Their vowel signs are part of the script's own Unicode block, not the Latin diacritics range, so Devanagari text comes out exactly as it went in.
Side effects of the normalisation step
NFKD also replaces "compatibility" characters with their plain equivalents, which is often helpful but worth knowing:
- The ligature "fi" becomes "fi", common in text copied from PDFs.
- Superscripts and circled numbers become digits: ² becomes 2 and ① becomes 1.
- ½ becomes 1⁄2, written with a special fraction slash.
- Full-width letters and Unicode "fancy" styles turn back into ordinary letters, so 𝗯𝗼𝗹𝗱 text made with a bold text generator comes out as plain "bold".
Good uses, and when to keep the accents
Removing accents helps when matching names across lists ("José" in one spreadsheet, "Jose" in another), building usernames, email aliases and file names, importing CSV files into older software that mangles non-ASCII characters, and preparing search keywords. For URL slugs, the slug generator already removes accents as part of its job.
Keep the original spelling on anything official, such as certificates, visa forms and published names. In some languages the accent changes meaning: Spanish "año" means year, while "ano" is a completely different and rather embarrassing word. The conversion happens in your browser, so lists of names are not uploaded.