Punctuation Remover
Paste text, pick which punctuation marks to strip, and copy the cleaned result. Toggle individual marks, use a quick preset, and decide whether to keep contractions safe.
How to use the punctuation remover
1. Paste the text
Drop the text into the Input box on the left. Anything that came from Word, Google Docs, a PDF, an email, a code editor, or a web page is fine. Smart quotes (the curly versions “ and ”) and long dashes are handled the same way as their plain counterparts.
2. Pick which marks to remove
Each punctuation type is a separate toggle, so you can strip exactly what you need. Commas are on by default because that is the most common case. Use the preset buttons to switch many toggles at once: All turns everything on, None resets, Sentence-ending only keeps everything except periods, question marks, and exclamation marks, and Quotes only targets the four straight and curly quote characters.
3. Decide on the replacement
By default each removed mark becomes nothing. That works when you want a compact, clean result. Turn Replace with space instead of nothing on if the punctuation is sitting between two words and you need to keep them separated. end.Next becomes endNext without it and end Next with it.
4. Clean and copy
Click Clean. The output appears on the right with a count of how many punctuation characters were removed. Use the Copy button to grab the result or Download to save a .txt file.
When you need to remove punctuation
Stripping punctuation is one of those small jobs that shows up in surprisingly different workflows. Here are the common ones.
cat, and cat as different tokens. Click All, turn on Replace with space, and feed the result into your tokenizer for a cleaner vocabulary.Apostrophes, smart quotes, and other gotchas
A punctuation remover sounds simple, but a few characters cause more trouble than the rest. Knowing which ones lets you pick the right toggle combination.
Apostrophes inside contractions. The apostrophe in don't, it's, they're, or you'll is the same character as the apostrophe in a possessive like Mary's. A bulk remover cannot tell them apart, so turning the Apostrophes toggle on will turn every contraction into something like dont or youll. That is fine for some NLP pipelines and bad for human reading. The Sentence-ending only and Quotes only presets leave apostrophes off for this reason.
Smart quotes. Most word processors substitute the plain ' and " for typographic versions: ‘ ’ “ ”. They look better in print but they are different Unicode characters. The Quotes toggle in this tool strips both the straight and curly versions in one pass, so you do not have to normalize first.
Dashes versus em-dashes. A hyphen - joins compound words. An en dash – marks ranges (pages 12–15). An em dash — creates a strong sentence break. Pasting from a Word doc routinely brings em-dashes you did not type. The two dash toggles let you remove them independently.
Hidden punctuation. Bullet characters (•), middle dots, ellipses (…), and section signs occasionally hide in pasted text. They are not part of standard punctuation, so this tool leaves them alone. If you need a single pass that handles those too, see Text Cleaner.
Related tools
Frequently asked questions
How do I remove all punctuation from a block of text?
Paste your text in the input box and click the All preset to switch every punctuation toggle on. Click Clean. The output strips every comma, period, semicolon, colon, question mark, exclamation mark, bracket, quote, dash, apostrophe, and em or en dash. Use the Copy button to grab the result.
Will removing apostrophes break my contractions?
Yes. Stripping apostrophes turns don't into dont, it's into its, and you'll into youll. If you need to keep contractions readable, leave the Apostrophes toggle off. The All preset enables it, so use a custom selection or the Sentence-ending only preset if contractions matter.
Why would I replace punctuation with a space instead of nothing?
Removing punctuation cleanly can fuse two words together. The string end.Next becomes endNext. Replacing with a space gives you end Next, which keeps the word boundary intact. Turn the Replace with space option on whenever your downstream tool (a word counter, a tokenizer, an NLP pipeline) needs words separated.
What is the difference between a hyphen, an en dash, and an em dash?
A hyphen (-) joins words like well-known or compound-modifier. An en dash (–) marks ranges, as in pages 12–15. An em dash (—) is a sentence break. The Dashes/hyphens toggle handles the regular hyphen. The Em-dashes/En-dashes toggle handles the longer typographic versions, which often arrive via copy-paste from Word, Google Docs, or web articles.
Does the tool handle smart quotes (curly quotes)?
Yes. The Quotes toggle strips both straight quotes (' and ") and the curly typographic versions (‘ ’ “ ”) that Word, Pages, and most CMS editors auto-substitute. You do not need to convert smart quotes back to straight first.
How do I remove only the periods at the end of sentences?
Click the Sentence-ending only preset. That switches on periods, question marks, and exclamation marks and switches every other toggle off. Click Clean. The result keeps commas, brackets, quotes, dashes, and apostrophes intact while stripping the terminal punctuation.
Can I strip punctuation before counting words for an NLP project?
Yes. Click the All preset, turn on Replace with space, and click Clean. The result has no punctuation, no glued words, and is ready to feed into a tokenizer, a TF-IDF vectorizer, a bag-of-words counter, or a similar preprocessing step. For longer documents, copy the result directly into your script or notebook.
I'm prepping a corpus for an NLP model and feeding in research samples. Could those texts be reused for training?
No. Punctuation removal runs in your browser using JavaScript regex. The corpus you paste is not sent to any backend, not retained, and not added to any training pipeline. The cleaned output is yours alone.
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