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Remove Punctuation

Strip punctuation marks and keep the words.

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Quick Tool Overview

Remove Punctuation strips punctuation marks from a text while keeping the words and spacing, which is the standard preparation step for word frequency work, readability scoring and machine learning tokenisation. Apostrophes, hyphens and sentence-ending marks can each be kept when your next step needs them.

What it does
Removes punctuation marks and keeps the words
You give it
A document, transcript or corpus
You get back
The text without punctuation, spacing intact
Best for
Text analysis, NLP preprocessing and word puzzles
Text Tools Free, unlimited use No sign-up Runs in your browser

About the Remove Punctuation

Removing punctuation is normally a preparation step rather than an end in itself. Text analysis, word frequency work, machine learning tokenisation and Scrabble-style word puzzles all want the words without the marks around them, because "word." and "word" should not count as two different things.

Every Unicode punctuation character is removed, not just the ASCII ones — curly quotes, em dashes, ellipses and the full-width marks used in CJK text are all handled. Because the right answer depends on the job, you can keep specific marks: apostrophes so that contractions survive, hyphens so that compound words stay whole, or sentence-ending marks so that the text can still be split into sentences afterwards.

Key features of the Remove Punctuation

Full Unicode coverage

Curly quotes, en and em dashes, ellipses and full-width CJK marks are all removed, not just the ASCII set.

Keep apostrophes

So "don't" does not become "dont" — the difference matters for every frequency and readability calculation.

Keep hyphens

Compound words stay as one token instead of fragmenting into four, which is usually wrong for analysis.

Delete or replace with a space

A mark joining two words is replaced so they do not fuse; a mark against one word is simply deleted.

Sentence marks optional

Keep full stops, question marks and exclamation marks when a later step still needs to split the text into sentences.

How to use the Remove Punctuation

  1. 1

    Paste your text

    A document, a transcript or anything you are preparing for analysis.

  2. 2

    Decide what to keep

    Apostrophes, hyphens and sentence-ending marks can each be preserved if your next step needs them.

  3. 3

    Choose what replaces them

    Delete the marks outright, or replace each with a space so words do not run together.

  4. 4

    Copy the stripped text

    Copy the result or download it as a text file for your pipeline.

Frequently asked questions

Replace with a space when a mark joins two words, such as a slash or an em dash, or the words will fuse. Delete outright for apostrophes and marks that sit against a single word.

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