Free tools
Punctuation Remover
Free online punctuation remover. Paste text to instantly remove all punctuation marks, leaving only letters, numbers, and spaces.
Punctuation Remover
Remove all punctuation marks from your text instantly. This tool strips periods, commas, exclamation marks, question marks, and all other punctuation, leaving only letters, numbers, and spaces. Optionally keep hyphens for compound words and apostrophes for contractions.
What Punctuation Is Removed?
By default, the tool removes:
- Periods (.), commas (,), semicolons (;), colons (:)
- Exclamation marks (!), question marks (?)
- Quotation marks (" and '), apostrophes (')
- Parentheses (()), brackets ([]), braces (), angle brackets ()
- Hyphens (-), en dashes (–), em dashes (—), slashes (/ and \)
- Vertical bars (|), at signs (@), hash symbols (#)
- Dollar signs ($), percent signs (%), ampersands (&), asterisks (*)
- Underscores (_), equal signs (=), plus signs (+)
Common Use Cases
- Text analysis: Prepare text for word frequency analysis
- Data cleaning: Remove formatting from copied text
- Word clouds: Clean text before generating word clouds
- NLP preprocessing: Prepare text for natural language processing
- Keyword extraction: Remove punctuation for cleaner analysis
How to Use This Tool
- Paste your text into the input box.
- The result appears automatically — no button needed.
- Toggle options if you want to keep hyphens or apostrophes.
- Click Copy Result to copy the cleaned text.
Everything runs in your browser — your text is never sent to any server.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I remove punctuation from text?
Paste or type your text into the input box. The tool instantly removes all punctuation marks including periods, commas, exclamation marks, question marks, quotation marks, apostrophes, colons, semicolons, and special characters. The cleaned text appears automatically below.
What characters are removed?
The tool removes all standard punctuation: . , ; : ! ? ' " ( ) [ ] { } - – — / \ | @ # $ % & * _ = + < >. It keeps letters, numbers, and spaces. You can also choose to keep or remove hyphens and apostrophes if needed.
Can I keep certain punctuation marks?
By default, all punctuation is removed. Use the checkboxes to optionally keep hyphens (for compound words like 'well-known') and apostrophes (for contractions like 'don't'). All other punctuation is always removed.
Why would I need to remove punctuation?
Common use cases include: preparing text for keyword analysis, cleaning data for natural language processing, creating word clouds, preparing text for certain types of text mining, or simplifying text for readability exercises.
Is there a limit to text length?
No. The tool runs entirely in your browser, so you can process very long documents without issues. Large texts may take a moment to process, but there's no artificial size limit.