Remove Punctuation
Strip all punctuation marks from your text in one click — commas, periods, question marks, quotes, brackets, and everything else. Optionally keep apostrophes in contractions (like "don't") so your words remain readable. No signup, no uploads — everything runs right in your browser.
Why use this Remove Punctuation tool?
Whether you're cleaning data for analysis, preparing text for machine learning, or simply want a raw block of words without any marks, removing punctuation is a common first step. This tool does it instantly and gives you control over apostrophes — because losing them can turn "don't" into "dont", which is rarely what you want.
- Removes all common punctuation – periods, commas, question/exclamation marks, colons, semicolons, dashes, parentheses, brackets, braces, slashes, quotes, and more.
- Preserves apostrophes – toggle to keep apostrophes within words, so "it's" stays "it's" and "John's" stays "John's".
- Instant preview – the result updates as you type (with a short delay) or when you click the button.
- 100% private – all processing happens locally in your browser; your text never leaves your device.
How to remove punctuation (step‑by‑step)
1. Paste your text
Copy any text containing punctuation and drop it into the left box.
2. Choose apostrophe behavior
By default, apostrophes inside words are kept. Uncheck the option if you want to remove those as well (e.g., "don't" → "dont").
3. See the result
The cleaned text appears on the right without any punctuation marks.
4. Copy or download
Use the buttons to copy the result or save it as a .txt file.
Example: before and after
| Input text | Output (keep apostrophes on) | Output (all punctuation removed) |
|---|---|---|
| Hello, world! How's it going? I'm fine — thanks. (Really!) | Hello world How's it going I'm fine thanks Really | Hello world Hows it going Im fine thanks Really |
Common use cases
- Natural Language Processing (NLP): Remove punctuation to create a clean word list for tokenization or frequency analysis.
- Data cleaning: Strip punctuation from CSV fields or scraped text before database import.
- Text to speech: Prepare script text for TTS engines that may stumble on punctuation.
- Accessibility: Create a plain text version of content for screen readers that may read punctuation aloud.
- Search keywords: Generate a string of words without punctuation for use in URLs or tags.
Pro tips
- The tool considers apostrophes as word characters when the "keep apostrophes" option is enabled. So "don't" becomes "don't", not "don t".
- If you need to remove everything except letters and numbers, combine this tool with Remove Symbols.
- After removing punctuation, you might end up with extra spaces. Use our Whitespace Cleaner to normalize spaces.
- For removing only specific punctuation marks, you could first remove all, then use Text Finder & Replacer to add back what you need.