Remove Punctuation
Strip all punctuation marks from your text, leaving only letters, numbers, and spaces.
How to use this tool
- Enter text in the fields above.
- Results update instantly as you type — or click Calculate.
- Read your cleaned text and the full breakdown beneath it.
Strip all punctuation marks from your text, leaving only letters, numbers, and spaces.
How it works
This tool strips all punctuation marks from your text, leaving only letters, digits, and spaces. It removes characters such as periods, commas, apostrophes, quotation marks, hyphens, exclamation marks, question marks, colons, semicolons, and brackets.
Paste any text into the input and the clean version -- free of punctuation -- is returned instantly. The relative order of words and the spacing between them are preserved; only the punctuation characters themselves are deleted.
Common uses include preparing text for natural language processing (NLP) pipelines, cleaning input before word-frequency analysis, creating simplified versions of text for readability tests, or removing punctuation before feeding text into tools that cannot handle it.
Note that apostrophes in contractions (can't, it's) and possessives (John's) are also removed, so 'can't' becomes 'cant' and 'it's' becomes 'its'. If preserving contractions matters, you may need to preprocess or post-process the text manually.
Worked example
Clean a sentence for word-frequency analysis
- Paste: 'Hello, world! This is a test. Isn't it great?'
- The tool removes: , ! . ' ?
- Output: 'Hello world This is a test Isnt it great'
Hello world This is a test Isnt it great
Common mistakes to avoid
- Expecting contractions to be preserved -- apostrophes are removed, so 'don't' becomes 'dont' rather than 'do not'.
- Using the output directly in contexts where sentence boundaries matter -- without periods, the text is one continuous block.
- Removing punctuation from code or URLs -- slashes, dots, and colons that are part of identifiers will also be stripped.
Key terms
- Punctuation
- Characters used in writing to separate sentences and clauses and to clarify meaning, such as . , ! ? ; : ' " - ( ) [ ].
- NLP (Natural Language Processing)
- A field of AI concerned with the interaction between computers and human language; punctuation removal is a common preprocessing step.
- Token
- An individual unit of text -- typically a word -- after text has been split and cleaned for analysis.
Frequently asked questions
- Are underscores removed?
- Yes — underscores are also removed since they are not typical punctuation in natural language.