Remove punctuation from text, with apostrophes and hyphens kept

How to use the Punctuation Remover

1. Paste your text into Your text.
2. Leave Keep apostrophes inside words (don’t) ticked to protect contractions and possessives.
3. Leave Keep hyphens inside words (state-of-the-art) ticked to protect compound words.
4. Tick Also remove symbols (# $ % + = @ …) if you want currency signs, maths signs and emoji gone too.
5. Copy the cleaned text.

What it does and when to use it

Punctuation is useful for readers but often gets in the way of processing text. Removing it helps when you:

• prepare text for word counts, word clouds or frequency lists, so “end,” and “end” count as one word;
• build a list of keywords or tags from a sentence;
• clean song lyrics, captions or transcripts for a data set;
• make a plain version of a title for a file name.

The two “keep” options exist because blanket removal damages words. Without them, “don’t” turns into “dont” and “well-known” into “wellknown”, which changes spelling and can merge separate words.

For a file name or web address, the URL Slug Generator does this job and also lowercases and joins the words. To remove only a few chosen characters, use Remove Specific Characters. Text copied from web pages may also hide zero-width characters; the Invisible Character Remover clears those.

How it works

First, apostrophes between two letters and hyphens between two letters or digits are swapped for temporary placeholders, if those options are on. Next, every character in the Unicode “punctuation” class is deleted, except # % ‰ @ & * / § ¶ † ‡ and the backslash, which are treated as symbols. When you tick the symbols option, those go too, along with the Unicode “symbol” class. The placeholders are turned back into ’ and -. Note that a curly ’ inside a word comes back as a straight ’. Finally, runs of spaces are reduced to one and each line is trimmed. The text is processed in your browser.

Worked examples

Default settings. Wait... is it "well-known"? Yes: it's state-of-the-art! becomes Wait is it well-known Yes it's state-of-the-art. The dots, quotes, question mark, colon and exclamation mark go; the apostrophe and the hyphens inside words stay.

Keep options off. The same sentence with both boxes unticked gives Wait is it wellknown Yes its stateoftheart.

Symbols too. “Email me @ 9am: 50% off + free #shipping” with the symbols option ticked gives Email me 9am 50 off free shipping. With it unticked, the @, %, + and # all stay: Email me @ 9am 50% off + free #shipping.

Limits and tips

• Hyphens with spaces around them, such as a dash used in a sentence, are removed.
• Accented letters and letters from other alphabets are never removed.