Remove accents and diacritics — café to cafe, Straße to Strasse

How to use Remove Accents & Diacritics

1. Paste your text into Your text. The sample shows dishes and place names with accents and special letters.
2. Tick Also simplify compatibility characters (fi → fi, ² → 2, Ｗ → W) if your text contains full-width letters, superscripts or symbols such as ™.
3. Copy the plain result.

What it does and when to use it

Many systems still struggle with accented letters. Old databases, some payment forms, airline booking systems, command-line tools and file systems can turn “José” into “José” or reject it. Search is another reason: someone who types “Zurich” will not find “Zürich” unless both are folded to the same form.

Use the tool to:

• prepare names for systems that accept only A–Z, such as some ID forms and machine-readable fields;
• build search keys or match lists where “Mueller”, “Müller” and “Muller” should line up (note that ü becomes u, not ue);
• clean file names before sharing them across computers;
• make plain versions of titles for code, data or URLs.

For web addresses, the URL Slug Generator does the accent removal and the hyphens in one step. To clean other hidden problems in pasted text, use the Invisible Character Remover. If capital letters also need sorting out, the Case Converter can follow.

How it works

Unicode lets most accented letters be written two ways: as one character (é) or as a base letter followed by a combining mark (e + ´). The tool converts your text to the split form, called NFD, and deletes every combining mark. With the compatibility option on, it uses NFKD instead, which also splits styled characters into plain ones.

Some letters are not made of a base plus a mark, so splitting does nothing to them. For those, the tool uses a fixed table: ß and ẞ, æ, œ, ø, ł, đ, ð, þ, ı, ĸ, ŋ, ħ, ŧ, the long s (ſ), the ff fi fl ffi ffl ſt st ligatures and ij. Upper-case forms keep their case, so Æ becomes AE. The text is then recombined and returned. It all happens in your browser.

Worked examples

City names. “São Paulo, Zürich, Kraków, Reykjavík” becomes Sao Paulo, Zurich, Krakow, Reykjavik.

Special letters. “Søren, Þórr, Œuvre, Dvořák, İstanbul, Nguyễn” gives Soren, Thorr, OEuvre, Dvorak, Istanbul, Nguyen. Þ is spelled out as Th, Œ as OE, and the Vietnamese ễ, which carries two marks, loses both.

Compatibility on. “Ｈｅｌｌｏ ½ ™ ①” (full-width letters) is unchanged by default. With the option ticked, it becomes Hello 1⁄2 TM 1.

Limits and tips

• German speakers often write ü as ue; this tool writes u. Use Find & Replace first if you need the ue form.
• Letters from non-Latin alphabets are kept in their own script.