Text Censor Tool
Redact or censor sensitive words and phrases from text with custom replacement patterns.
Options
Characters: 0Occurrences Censored: 0
Text Censor Tool — redact sensitive words from any text
Need to share a document but remove sensitive information first? The Text Censor Tool lets you specify a list of words or phrases to redact, choosing between asterisk masking (***), block characters (████), a fixed [REDACTED] label, or your own custom replacement. Options for case-sensitive and whole-word matching give you precise control — useful for removing API keys, passwords, names, or any proprietary content before sharing logs, code snippets, or documentation.
Built and maintained by Meet Shah · Last updated
What this tool is used for
- Redacting names or terms from a transcript before sharing it.
- Masking sensitive words in a log extract for a ticket.
- Producing a sanitised example for documentation.
- Applying a consistent replacement pattern across a document.
- Removing a client's name from a case study draft.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is censored text actually removed?
- Yes — the matched words are replaced in the output string, so what you copy contains the replacement and not the original. That is the important difference from a visual redaction, where the text is still present underneath a black rectangle.
- Why is a black rectangle over a PDF not redaction?
- Because the text layer is untouched — selecting, copying or extracting the page recovers it instantly. Real redaction removes the content and re-renders. This has leaked genuinely sensitive material from court filings and government documents repeatedly.
- Does the replacement preserve the original length?
- Only with the block or asterisk styles, and that itself leaks information — a five-character block tells a reader the word had five characters. A fixed `[REDACTED]` marker removes that side channel, which is why it is the safer choice for anything sensitive.
- Does it catch variations of a word?
- It matches what you give it, so plurals, possessives and different casing need to be listed or handled with a case-insensitive match. Anything that must be caught reliably — a name in several forms — is worth checking by searching the output afterwards.
- Is this suitable for redacting a real document?
- For a quick text paste, yes, since everything runs locally and nothing is transmitted. For a legal or compliance redaction, no — that requires a tool that removes content from the file format itself and a review step, not a string replacement.
Common errors and gotchas
- Redacting the obvious terms and leaving the surrounding context that identifies the same thing.
- Using a consistent mask per term, which preserves the ability to correlate occurrences.
- Assuming redaction is anonymisation, which needs more than word replacement.
- Missing variants — plurals, possessives, misspellings — that the pattern does not cover.
- Sharing the original by mistake because the redacted copy was saved separately.
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