Remove Punctuation

This tool deletes the standard keyboard punctuation marks from your text, such as full stops, commas, quotes, brackets, hyphens and the @ # $ % family, and leaves letters, digits, spaces and line breaks alone. It is mostly used to prepare text for word counts, keyword analysis, matching and search, where "India," and "India" should be the same word.

The exact characters that are removed

The tool removes these 31 ASCII symbols wherever they appear:

! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . / : ; < = > ? @ [ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~

Removed characters are simply deleted, not replaced with a space, so things that were joined by punctuation get glued together. Some examples:

• it's becomes its, and well-known becomes wellknown.
• 5:30 p.m. becomes 530 pm and 3.14 becomes 314.
• asha@example.com becomes ashaexamplecom, and +91-98765-43210 becomes 919876543210.
• C++ & C# becomes C C, with a double space where the ampersand stood.

Punctuation that is not removed

Only the ASCII set above is targeted. Typographic and non-English marks pass straight through:

• curly or "smart" quotes and apostrophes (“ ” ‘ ’), which Word, Google Docs and phone keyboards insert automatically;
• the en dash and em dash, and the single-character ellipsis (…);
• the Devanagari danda (।) used as a full stop in Hindi and Marathi, and Spanish ¿ and ¡;
• the backslash, which is missing from the tool's list, so C:\Users ends up as C\Users.

In a test, “Don’t panic,” she said came back as “Don’t panic” she said: only the comma went. If your text came from a word processor, replace smart quotes with straight ones first, or remove them by hand.

Where stripping punctuation helps

• Word and keyword analysis: frequency counters and keyword tools treat "price," and "price" as different tokens. Clean text gives honest counts; run it through the word frequency counter afterwards.
• Matching and de-duplicating names: "Dr. A. K. Singh" and "Dr A K Singh" become identical, which helps when merging contact lists or comparing registrations.
• Making tags and IDs: turning a phrase into something you can use as a hashtag or file name. For web addresses, the slug generator is a better choice because it also adds hyphens and lowercases the text.
• Teaching and puzzles: give students an unpunctuated passage and ask them to put the commas and full stops back.

Tips before you run it

Because hyphens and apostrophes are deleted rather than turned into spaces, decide whether you want e-mail to become email (usually fine) or two words. If you need a space instead, find and replace the hyphen with a space before using the tool. Numbers lose their decimal points and thousands separators, so keep a copy of the original if figures matter. Double spaces left behind by removed symbols can be tidied with Remove Extra Spaces.