Text/Clean

Remove special characters

Keeps only letters, digits and whitespace in any language and removes symbols. You can choose extra characters to keep.

Example

  • Options used
  • Default options
Input
★Best★ Price!! ~50% OFF※ (today) ▶ Shop_now
Output
Best Price!! 50% OFF (today)  Shopnow

Symbols in examples: ⇥ tab · · trailing space · ⍽ NBSP · □ full-width space · ◌ zero-width character

Open this operation in the tool

What it does

Keeps only letters (in every script: Hangul, Latin, Chinese characters, kana, Cyrillic, Arabic and more), digits, combining marks, spaces and line breaks, and removes all other symbols. It uses Unicode character categories, so accented letters like é and ñ are kept as letters.

Options

  • Keep basic punctuation: on by default, keeping . , ! ? ; : ' " ( ) - % & / @ #. Suited to removing only decorative symbols such as ★, ※, ♥, ▶ and ~ while leaving sentences readable.
  • Extra characters to keep: type the characters that should not be removed, one after another. For example, entering _+= also keeps underscores, plus signs and equals signs.

When to use it

Use it to remove symbols that are not allowed in file names, to build search keywords or tags, or to strip the symbols from heavily decorated online store product names. Turn the option off to remove punctuation as well.

Caution

Emoji are classified as symbols, so most of them are removed by this operation too, but combining fragments may be left behind like spaces. For emoji-heavy text, apply Remove emoji first. Currency symbols (₩, $) and math symbols are removed too, so add them to 'Extra characters to keep' if needed.