🧹 Remove Punctuation

Remove all punctuation marks and special characters from your text. Strip away periods, commas, exclamation marks, question marks, and other punctuation to leave clean, normalized text. Perfect for text processing and data cleaning.

Enter Your Text:

📌 Without Punctuation:

Type or paste text to see version without punctuation...

Original Chars

Cleaned Chars

Marks Removed

💡 How it works:

Paste or type your text in the textarea above
The tool automatically detects and removes all punctuation marks
Preserves letters, numbers, and spaces
Removes: . , ! ? ; : " ' ( ) [ ] { } - / \ @ # $ % ^ & * etc.
Statistics show punctuation marks removed
Results update in real-time as you type

📝 Examples:

Input (With Punctuation):

Hello, World! How are you? I'm fine, thanks.

Output (Without Punctuation):

Hello World How are you Im fine thanks

Input (Complex Punctuation):

Email: john.doe@example.com; Phone: (555) 123-4567. Price: $99.99

Output (Cleaned):

Email johndoeexamplecom Phone 555 1234567 Price 9999

Statistics:

Original Characters: 55
Cleaned Characters: 44
Punctuation Removed: 11

🔤 Punctuation Marks Removed:

. (period)

, (comma)

! (exclamation)

? (question)

; (semicolon)

: (colon)

" (quotes)

' (apostrophe)

( ) (parentheses)

[ ] (brackets)

{ } (braces)

- (hyphen)

/ (slash)

\ (backslash)

@ (at)

# (hash)

📚 Use Cases:

Clean text for natural language processing and analysis
Normalize data before importing into databases
Prepare text for search indexing and tokenization
Remove formatting from copied text
Clean up email addresses and URLs for processing
Prepare text for machine learning models
Standardize content for text comparison

ℹ️ Note: This tool removes all punctuation marks and special characters while preserving letters, numbers, and spaces. Apostrophes in contractions (like "it's" or "don't") are also removed.

The exact set that is stripped

One character class does the work, and it holds the 32 ASCII punctuation marks - the same list as Python's string.punctuation:

! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . / : ; < = > ? @ [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~

"Hello, World! It's 1,000."   ->   "Hello World Its 1000"
25 characters                      20 characters, 5 marks removed

Letters, digits, spaces and line breaks are left exactly as they were, so the shape of your text does not change - only the marks disappear. Marks Removed is the difference between the two character counts.

What slips through, and what gets glued

Typographic punctuation survives. Curly quotes, the curly apostrophe in don’t, en and em dashes and the single-character ellipsis are all outside ASCII, so text from Word or a web page often comes back still carrying them. Straight quotes and hyphens do go.
No space is put in the gap. state-of-the-art becomes stateoftheart and 24/7 becomes 247. Replace hyphens and slashes with spaces first if you are tokenising words.
Non-English marks stay - the Spanish opening ¿, French guillemets, the Japanese full stop. This is an ASCII filter, not a Unicode one.

Symbols count as punctuation here, so $, %, @ and # go too: user@example.com comes back as userexamplecom. Keep a copy of anything you still need to read as an address or a price.

Frequently asked questions

Does it remove apostrophes from contractions?

A straight apostrophe goes, so don't becomes dont. The curly version that Word autocorrects to is a different character and stays - convert it to a straight quote first if you want it gone.

How do I strip punctuation in Python instead?

text.translate(str.maketrans("", "", string.punctuation)) removes the identical 32 characters. Use this page when you have one block of text rather than a pipeline.

Will my spaces and line breaks survive?

Yes. Only punctuation is deleted, so paragraphs and columns keep their layout. Removing marks can leave two spaces where a dash stood between words - run the result through Remove Extra Spaces if that matters.