Remove Special Characters
Remove all non-alphanumeric characters from text, with toggleable exceptions to keep spaces, line breaks, or basic punctuation.
Result (updates live):
How to remove special characters from text
Paste your text into the box above. By default, every character that isn't a letter or number is stripped out, leaving only alphanumeric text. Use the checkboxes to keep spaces, line breaks, or basic punctuation as exceptions — the result updates live as you type or change the options.
Example
"Hello!! @World #2024 (test)..." becomes "Hello World 2024 test" with spaces kept and everything else removed, or "HelloWorld2024test" with spaces unchecked too.
Common Use Cases
- Sanitizing user input or filenames before saving them.
- Stripping emoji, symbols, and stray formatting from scraped text.
- Preparing plain alphanumeric strings for use as IDs or slugs.
FAQs
Does this remove accented letters like é or ñ?
Yes — only plain ASCII letters (a-z, A-Z) and digits (0-9) are kept by default, so accented and non-Latin characters are treated as special characters and removed.
Can I keep punctuation like periods and commas?
Yes — tick "Keep basic punctuation" to preserve periods, commas, exclamation marks, question marks, colons, semicolons, quotes, parentheses, and hyphens while still removing other symbols.
Does it update as I type?
Yes — there's no button to click. The cleaned result recalculates instantly whenever you edit the text or toggle one of the "keep" options.