Remove Punctuation from Text
Paste any text and strip periods, commas, exclamation marks, quotes, and other punctuation in one click. Keep apostrophes in contractions like "don't" on by default, or turn that off for a fully punctuation-free result.
Why This Tool Matters
Punctuation gets in the way for some jobs even though it's essential for reading. Running a word-frequency count treats "great!" and "great" as two different words unless the punctuation is gone first. Importing open-ended survey responses into a spreadsheet is cleaner without stray commas and quotation marks breaking up cells. And some downstream tools — parsers, tokenizers, older text-processing scripts — choke on special characters they weren't built to handle. This tool strips the punctuation in one pass so the text is ready for whatever comes next, while still letting contractions read naturally if you want them to.
How to Use
- 01
Paste your text
Paste your text into the box above.
- 02
Adjust the option
Keep the contractions option on or off, depending on what you need.
- 03
Remove punctuation
Click Remove Punctuation and copy the cleaned-up result.
More Text Tools
- Try the full Case Converter →
- Need to join lines instead? Try Remove Line Breaks →
- Need to clean up spacing instead? Try Remove Spaces from Text →
- Need to dedupe a list instead? Try Remove Duplicate Lines →
- Need to tidy up spacing instead? Try Remove Blank Lines →
- Cleaning up markup instead? Try Remove HTML Tags →
- Need to check length after cleaning up? Try the Word Counter →
Frequently Asked Questions
Will this remove apostrophes from words like "don't" or "it's"?+−
Not by default. With "Keep apostrophes in contractions" checked, an apostrophe surrounded by letters on both sides — like the one in "don't" or "it's" — is left alone, while a standalone apostrophe used as a quote mark is still removed. Uncheck the option if you want every apostrophe stripped, contractions included.
Does it remove hyphens in hyphenated words?+−
Yes. A hyphen counts as standard punctuation, so "well-known" becomes "wellknown" after running through this tool. There's no separate toggle to preserve hyphens — if you need them kept, remove punctuation elsewhere and handle hyphens by hand.
Will email addresses or URLs in my text get broken?+−
Yes, likely. Periods, slashes, colons, and @ symbols are all standard punctuation, so an email address or URL will lose its structure — "[email protected]" becomes "testexamplecom". If you need to keep addresses or links intact, pull them out of the text before running this tool.
Can I undo this if I paste the wrong text?+−
Click Reset to restore the input box to whatever you originally pasted into it, as long as you haven't typed something new over it since. There's no multi-step undo history beyond that, so keep a copy of your original text elsewhere if you might need it later.