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.
Contractions are trickier than they look because an apostrophe is genuinely ambiguous: it can join two words into one ("don't"), or it can just be a quotation mark that happens to be doing something else entirely. Text pasted from different sources also mixes straight apostrophes (') with the curly, "smart" version (’) that word processors substitute automatically — this tool recognizes both, so switching the contractions setting off doesn't accidentally miss half of them because they were typed with a different character than expected.
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
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- Cleaning up markup instead? Try Remove HTML Tags
- Need to check length after cleaning up? Try the Word Counter
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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.
What happens to numbers with decimal points or commas, like 3.14 or $1,000?
The period and comma get stripped just like any other punctuation, so "3.14" becomes "314" and "$1,000" becomes "1000" — this tool doesn't treat punctuation differently based on whether it's sitting between digits. If you need to preserve numeric formatting, remove punctuation before those numbers enter your text, or handle numeric fields separately from the surrounding prose.