OCR documents
Scanned text introduces stray commas, periods, and misread symbols.
Remove Punctuation
Strip periods, commas, quotes, and symbols while optionally keeping apostrophes in contractions and hyphens in compound words.
Remove Punctuation
Strip symbols with fine-grained keep and preserve options plus live stats.
0
Characters removed
0
Punctuation count
0%
Reduction %
—
Most common symbol
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Active mode
Top Symbols Found
Most common: —
No punctuation detected
Paste or type text containing punctuation to clean.
Documents, tweets, OCR, or exports
De-punctuated or partially cleaned text
Your text stays in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
Example
Standard cleanup → Clean output
Before
Hello, world! It's well-known.
After
Hello world It's well-known
Quotes removed
She said "Hello" loudly.
→
She said Hello loudly
Decimals & emails preserved
Price is 3.14. Email test@example.com.
→
Price is 3.14 Email test@example.com
How to Use
- Paste text containing punctuation from documents, social posts, OCR output, or AI-generated content.
- Configure punctuation options — keep apostrophes, preserve decimals, or remove quotes only.
- Review the Top Symbols Found card and live stats for characters removed and reduction percentage.
- Copy cleaned text for the Word Frequency Counter, Character Counter, or downstream NLP workflows.
Common Punctuation Problems
AI-generated text
Normalize ChatGPT output with the Plain Text Converter, then strip smart quotes and em dashes here.
CSV exports
Quoted fields and comma separators add punctuation noise to pasted data.
Tweets and social posts
Strip symbols from social exports before using Remove Hashtags or Remove URLs.
Research datasets
Qualitative exports need symbol stripping before coding and analysis.
Search indexing
Punctuation in indexed text can split tokens and reduce match quality.
Punctuation Modes Explained
Keep apostrophes
Preserve contractions like It's and possessives during cleanup.
Keep hyphens
Retain compound words such as well-known and hyphenated terms.
Remove quotes only
Strip quotation marks while leaving other punctuation untouched.
Remove all punctuation
Default mode strips symbols except your selected keep and preserve options.
Preserve decimals
Keep decimal points in numbers like 3.14 and 25.5.
Preserve emails
Protect email addresses from symbol stripping during cleanup.
Before and After Examples
| Mode | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| All punctuation | Hello, world! |
Hello world |
| Keep apostrophes | It's John's book. |
It's John's book |
| Keep hyphens | Well-known. |
Well-known |
| Remove quotes | "Hello" |
Hello |
| Preserve decimals | 3.14, 25.5 |
3.14 25.5 |
| Preserve emails | test@example.com! |
test@example.com |
| Quotes only | "Hello" |
Hello |
| Hyphen preservation | well-known |
well-known |
| Email preservation | test@example.com |
test@example.com |
| URL preservation | https://example.com |
https://example.com |
Unicode Punctuation Examples
Unicode punctuation from word processors, AI tools, and multilingual text is detected and removed. Smart quotes, dashes, and language-specific marks are all supported.
Smart quotes
“Hello”
Single quotes
‘Hello’
Em dash
Hello — world
En dash
10–20
Ellipsis
Wait…
French quotes
« Bonjour »
Symbol Categories
By default, all categories below are removed unless you enable keep or preserve options. Hyphens and apostrophes can be kept; decimals, emails, and URLs can be preserved.
Periods
.
Removed unless inside preserved decimals.
Commas
,
Always removed in full mode.
Question marks
?
Includes Spanish ¿.
Exclamation marks
!
Includes Spanish ¡.
Quotes
" '
ASCII and Unicode quote marks.
Parentheses
( )
Round brackets removed.
Brackets
[ ]
Square and curly brackets.
Slashes
/
Removed unless inside preserved URLs.
Semicolons
;
Removed in full mode.
Colons
:
Removed in full mode.
Ampersands
&
Removed as symbols.
Currency symbols
$ € £
Removed unless keep symbols is off and targeted mode used.
Punctuation by Language
Multilingual punctuation is detected via Unicode matching. Strip language-specific marks while optionally keeping apostrophes and hyphens.
English
Standard commas, periods, and exclamation marks.
Before
Hello, world!
After
Hello world
Spanish
Inverted ¿ and ¡ marks are removed.
Before
¡Hola! ¿Cómo estás?
After
Hola Cómo estás
French
Guillemets « » are stripped from quoted text.
Before
« Bonjour »
After
Bonjour
German
Low-high German quotation marks are removed.
Before
„Hallo"
After
Hallo
Special Case Examples
Enable preserve options to protect structured data. Chain with Remove HTML Tags when cleaning markup-heavy paste first.
Decimal numbers
Before
3.14, 25.5
After
3.14 25.5
Negative numbers
Before
-5.2
After
-5.2
Emails
Before
john@example.com
After
john@example.com
URLs
Before
https://example.com
After
https://example.com
Abbreviations
Before
U.S.A.
After
USA
Preserve mode
Before
Price is 3.14. Email test@example.com.
After
Price is 3.14 Email test@example.com
AI and NLP Applications
Punctuation removal is a core preprocessing step before counting, embedding, or indexing text. Pair with Remove Extra Spaces for fully normalized output.
Word frequency analysis
Prepare clean input for the Word Frequency Counter without punctuation skewing counts.
Tokenization
Build consistent word tokens for bag-of-words and n-gram models.
Machine learning datasets
Normalize labeled corpora before training classification models.
Sentiment analysis
Remove symbol noise so polarity models focus on word content.
Search indexing
Strip punctuation that splits or duplicates index tokens.
OCR cleanup
Remove misread symbols from scanned document text.
Prompt engineering
Normalize AI prompt text before token budget analysis with the Character Counter.
Text preprocessing
First pass in a cleanup chain with the Plain Text Converter and related tools.
Notes & Limitations
- Unicode punctuation is supported via Unicode property matching.
- Decimal points can be preserved when the preserve decimals option is enabled.
- Emails and URLs can optionally be preserved during symbol removal.
- All processing is local in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
- Code snippets with meaningful
#or/characters may be affected — paste prose when possible.
Popular Workflows
Frequently Asked Questions
Why keep apostrophes?
Apostrophes in contractions like It's and possessives like John's keep text readable. Enable Keep apostrophes to preserve them during cleanup.
Can decimals be preserved?
Yes. Enable Preserve decimal numbers to keep decimal points in values like 3.14 and 25.5.
Will emails break?
Not when preserve is enabled. Turn on Preserve email addresses to protect @ and dots inside email patterns, or use Remove Emails for targeted redaction.
Can URLs stay intact?
Yes. Enable Preserve URLs to protect http:// and https:// links from symbol stripping.
Can I remove quotes only?
Yes. Enable Remove quotes only to strip quotation marks including smart quotes and guillemets without removing other punctuation.
What punctuation is removed?
By default, all Unicode punctuation and symbols are removed except your keep and preserve options. Targeted checkboxes remove only commas, periods, brackets, or symbols.
Does Unicode punctuation work?
Yes. Smart quotes, em dashes, ellipses, guillemets, and inverted Spanish marks are detected via Unicode property matching.
Will abbreviations change?
Trailing periods in abbreviations like Dr. and acronyms like U.S.A. are removed in full punctuation mode, producing USA.
Can I preserve hyphens?
Yes. Keep hyphens is enabled by default so compound words like well-known stay intact.
Can negative numbers be preserved?
Yes. With Preserve decimal numbers enabled, negative decimals like -5.2 keep their minus sign and decimal point.
Can I use this for NLP datasets?
Yes. This tool is designed for NLP preprocessing — strip punctuation before tokenization, frequency analysis, or model training pipelines.
Is my text uploaded?
No. All punctuation processing runs entirely in your browser using JavaScript. Your text never leaves your device.