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Remove Special Characters

Strip special characters from text — keep only letters, letters and numbers, or a custom character set. See exactly what was removed with category counts.

Removed: 0 characters Punctuation: 0 Symbols: 0 Numbers: 0
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How to use Remove Special Characters

  1. Paste your text into the input box.
  2. Choose a keep mode: Letters only, Letters + numbers, or Custom set.
  3. For Custom set, type the characters you want to keep.
  4. Review the removal stats below the text areas.
  5. Copy the cleaned text from the output box.

What is Remove Special Characters?

When working with text data, you often need to clean it by removing special characters, punctuation, and symbols. This is common when preparing text for machine learning, cleaning CSV data, normalizing text for search indexing, or preparing content for systems that only accept certain character sets.

Choose from three modes: Letters only keeps just A-Z and their unicode equivalents. Letters + numbers adds digits 0-9. Custom set lets you define exactly which characters to keep (e.g., "aeiou" keeps only vowels). The tool also shows a breakdown of what was removed — punctuation, symbols, and numbers — so you know exactly how your text was transformed. Everything runs in your browser; no uploads.

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FAQ

What counts as a special character?
Anything that is not a letter or number, depending on your chosen mode. This includes punctuation (.,!?;:), symbols (@#$%^&*), emoji, and other non-alphanumeric unicode characters. Whitespace is preserved by default.
Can I keep certain punctuation?
Yes — use Custom set mode and include the punctuation characters you want to keep (e.g., ".!," keeps periods, exclamation marks, and commas while removing everything else).
Does it handle non-English text?
Yes. The tool uses Unicode property escapes (\p{L} for letters, \p{N} for numbers), so it correctly handles letters from all scripts including Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Japanese, and accented Latin characters.
Is whitespace removed?
No — spaces, tabs, and newlines are preserved by default so your text structure stays intact.

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📖 Remove Special Characters on Wikipedia · Text Tools on Wikipedia · Remove Special Characters on Britannica

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