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Remove Special Characters
Paste text to strip symbols, emoji, invisible characters and anything else you do not want. Keep only letters, numbers and spaces, add your own allowed characters, or remove just the emoji or all non-ASCII characters.
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How to use the Remove Special Characters
- Paste your text in the left box. The cleaned version appears instantly on the right.
- Pick a mode: keep only allowed characters, remove emoji only, or remove non-ASCII characters.
- Choose what to keep with a preset or the checkboxes, and type any extra characters to allow, such as @ . _ -.
- Set the replacement: delete removed characters or turn them into a space, underscore or hyphen.
- Review the summary of removed characters, then copy or download the result.
Three ways to clean text
| Mode | What it does | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Keep only allowed | Builds an allowlist from letters, numbers, spaces, line breaks, basic punctuation and your own characters, and removes everything else | Usernames, IDs, product codes, keyword lists, form fields that reject symbols, data cleaning |
| Remove emoji only | Removes complete emoji, including multi-part ones, and leaves all other text untouched | Social media captions, chat exports, text for systems that cannot store emoji |
| Remove non-ASCII | Keeps the 95 printable ASCII characters, tabs and line breaks, after converting smart quotes, dashes and accents | Old software, CSV imports, code, SMS, systems that only accept plain English characters |
Presets explained
- Letters, numbers & spaces: the classic “remove special characters” result. Sentences stay readable, symbols and punctuation go.
- Letters & numbers: alphanumeric only, with no spaces or line breaks, for codes and identifiers such as Order4521.
- Letters only and Numbers only: pull just the words or just the digits out of messy text, for example a phone number from +1 (555) 010-2030.
- Filename-safe: keeps A–Z, 0–9, hyphens, underscores and dots, converts accents and turns every other character into an underscore, so Café menu (v2).pdf becomes Cafe_menu_v2.pdf.
- Text + basic punctuation: keeps normal sentence punctuation but removes symbols, emoji and unusual characters.
Why emoji and invisible characters are tricky
Many characters you see as one symbol are made of several Unicode code points. A family emoji such as 👨👩👧 is three emoji joined by invisible zero-width joiners, a thumbs-up with a skin tone is two code points, and a flag such as 🇫🇷 is two regional indicator letters. Simple find-and-replace tools often delete only part of these and leave broken pieces behind. This tool works on whole characters (grapheme clusters), so complete emoji are removed cleanly. It also removes invisible characters such as the zero-width space (U+200B), which often sneaks in when copying from web pages and causes mysterious errors in passwords, code and spreadsheets. Removed invisible characters are listed by their Unicode code in the summary.
Frequently asked questions
What is a special character?
There is no single official definition. In most forms and systems a special character is anything that is not a letter, a digit or a space: punctuation, symbols such as @ # $ % &, emoji, currency signs, math symbols, and invisible characters such as zero-width spaces. This tool lets you decide exactly what counts by choosing what to keep.
How do I keep only letters and numbers?
Use the Letters & numbers preset, or tick Letters and Numbers and untick Spaces and Line breaks. The result is alphanumeric text, which is useful for usernames, IDs, codes and passwords rules.
Will accented letters like é and ñ be removed?
Not by default: accented and non-Latin letters count as letters. Untick Accented & non-Latin letters to keep only A–Z, or tick Convert accents to plain letters to turn é into e and ñ into n instead of deleting them.
How do I remove only emoji?
Choose the Remove emoji only mode. It removes every emoji, including flags, skin-tone variants, keycaps and emoji joined with zero-width joiners, and leaves all other text, punctuation and symbols untouched.
What does Remove non-ASCII do?
ASCII is the basic set of 128 characters used in English: A–Z, a–z, 0–9, common punctuation, space and line breaks. Non-ASCII mode removes everything else. It first converts curly quotes to straight quotes, dashes to hyphens, the ellipsis to three dots and accented letters to plain ones, so the text stays readable.
Can I make a filename-safe or URL-safe string?
Yes. The Filename-safe preset keeps letters, numbers, hyphens, underscores and dots, and replaces everything else with an underscore. For web addresses, the URL Slug Generator also lowercases the text and joins words with hyphens.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. All processing happens locally in your browser, so the text never leaves your device.
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