Does this tool send my text to a server?

No. All processing happens entirely in your browser using JavaScript. Your text never leaves your device.

Can I keep specific characters while removing others?

Yes. Use the "Custom keep" field to enter any characters you want to preserve. For example, entering "@." keeps the at-sign and period while removing everything else that is not a letter or digit.

Will this remove accented letters like é or ñ?

By default, only ASCII letters (a–z, A–Z) are classified as letters. Accented and non-Latin characters are treated as special characters and removed unless you add them to the custom keep list.

What counts as punctuation?

The punctuation option keeps the most common ASCII punctuation marks: period, comma, semicolon, colon, exclamation mark, question mark, apostrophe, hyphen, and parentheses.

Is there a character limit?

There is no enforced limit. Performance may slow for very large inputs (millions of characters), but typical documents process instantly.

Special Character Remover

Name: Special Character Remover
Availability: InStock
Author: Nham Vu

Paste your text and instantly strip unwanted special characters, with fine-grained control over what to keep.

Input Text

0 characters

Keep these characters

Letters (a–z, A–Z) Digits (0–9) Spaces Line breaks Common punctuation ( . , ; : ! ? ' - ( ) )

Custom keep characters

Any character you type here will always be preserved.

Cleaned Text

0 characters 0 removed

Summary

0 Input chars

0 Output chars

0 Removed

Summary

Paste your text and instantly strip unwanted special characters, with fine-grained control over what to keep.

How it works

Paste or type your text into the input box on the left.
Choose which character groups to keep: spaces, digits, letters, punctuation, or a custom set.
The cleaned output appears instantly in the result panel on the right.
Click "Copy Result" to copy the cleaned text to your clipboard.
Use "Clear" to reset both panels and start fresh.

Use cases

Clean up CSV data that contains stray symbols or control characters.
Sanitize user-generated content before storing it in a database.
Strip formatting artifacts from text copied out of a PDF or Word document.
Prepare slugs or identifiers by removing disallowed characters.
Remove emoji and non-ASCII symbols from social media exports.
Normalize text for NLP pipelines that expect plain ASCII input.
Strip HTML-encoded symbols or leftover markup from scraped content.
Quickly remove punctuation before running word-frequency analysis.

Frequently Asked Questions

Last updated: 2026-06-09 · Reviewed by Nham Vu