Remove Special Characters

Strip symbols, punctuation, and unwanted characters from text.

Tool Settings

Input text

Mode

Remove symbols

Keep letters, digits, spaces, and common punctuation (.,-_)

Letters only

Keep only A–Z and a–z (and spaces)

Numbers only

Keep only 0–9 (and spaces)

Alphanumeric

Keep only letters and digits (and spaces)

Custom

Specify exactly which characters to keep

Keep whitespace (spaces, newlines)

Output

Original Characters: 0Characters Kept: 0Characters Removed: 0

How special character removal works

Each mode uses a regular expression to filter the input. "Remove symbols" keeps alphanumerics, whitespace, and common safe punctuation (. , - _). "Letters only" keeps only A–Z and a–z. "Alphanumeric" keeps letters and digits. The "Custom" mode builds a regex character class from the characters you specify, keeping only those.

Related tools: Remove Punctuation, Remove Extra Spaces.

Built and maintained by Meet Shah · Last updated 13 August 2026

What this tool is used for

Cleaning a value before using it as a filename or a key.
Stripping symbols from text before a frequency analysis.
Preparing input for a field that only accepts alphanumerics.
Removing control and junk characters from a scraped string.
Normalising a value that will be compared against a cleaned version.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Remove symbols actually keep?: Letters, digits, underscore, whitespace, and the marks . , - _ along with the apostrophe. The letter class is ASCII-only, so accented and non-Latin letters go out with the symbols — café becomes caf, and a Cyrillic or CJK word disappears entirely. Use Custom mode when those have to survive.
Does Keep whitespace affect every mode?: It does now. In Remove symbols the checkbox previously had no effect at all, because whitespace was written into the keep-set unconditionally while the other four modes read the setting. Unchecking it now collapses a multi-line paste into one unbroken run in every mode.
Does Custom mode understand ranges like 0-9?: No. Everything you type is escaped and matched literally, so 0-9 keeps the three characters 0, - and 9 rather than the ten digits — spell the set out in full. That escaping is also what stops a stray bracket or backslash from turning your input into a broken pattern.
Which mode is safest for filenames?: Alphanumeric with whitespace off: it leaves only A–Z, a–z and 0–9, which every filesystem accepts without quoting. Remove symbols keeps dots and hyphens, usually fine in a filename, but it also keeps the apostrophe — and that still needs escaping in most shells.
Why are the counters measured in graphemes?: So they add up. Original minus Kept equals Removed only when all three count the same unit, and one 👍 is two UTF-16 code units but a single grapheme. Counting code units reported Original 1, Kept 0, Removed 2 for a single deleted emoji — three numbers that could not be reconciled.

Common errors and gotchas

Removing hyphens and apostrophes, which changes words rather than cleaning them.
Stripping characters from code or a regex, where they are syntax.
Assuming only ASCII symbols are removed, when other scripts have their own punctuation.
Losing accented letters if the definition of 'special' includes them.
Leaving behind the whitespace the removed characters occupied, producing doubled spaces.