Remove Special Characters from Text
Remove symbols, punctuation and special characters from text in one click, keeping only letters, numbers or both. Free online text cleaner that runs in your browser.
Text Sanitizer
Clean and format strings for databases or code.
SEO Safe
Prepare post slugs or metadata by stripping non-standard characters automatically.
Clean Output
Normalize double-spaces and broken line breaks for perfectly formatted data.
Privacy
Your data is processed locally in your browser and is never stored on our servers.
About this tool
Strip symbols, punctuation, and stray artifacts out of any text, keeping only letters, only numbers, or both — your choice. It's the cleanup step between messy input and strict systems: filenames, database fields, form validators, and word-frequency scripts that all choke on characters they didn't expect.
How to Strip Special Characters
- 1
Paste the text containing unwanted characters — content copied from PDFs, exports with stray control characters, or user input headed for a picky system.
- 2
Choose what survives: letters only, digits only, or alphanumeric. Everything outside your chosen set — punctuation, symbols, invisible artifacts — is removed.
- 3
Copy the sanitized output, now safe for filenames, IDs, database imports, or any destination with strict character rules.
Why Sanitize Text with Wrklyst
- Sensitive Inputs Stay Local
- Character filtering runs in the page itself, so the customer data or internal strings you're cleaning never appear in anyone's request logs.
- Bulk Cleanup in One Pass
- A thousand lines are filtered as fast as one — no per-row find-and-replace or fragile spreadsheet formulas.
- Zero Setup Cost
- It replaces a regex you'd otherwise have to write, test, and debug, with no login and nothing to remember next time.
Sanitization Tips
- Clean a copy, not the original — over-stripping is easy and you'll sometimes want the punctuation back.
- Preparing text for word-frequency analysis? Strip punctuation but keep spaces, or every word fuses into one.
- Invisible characters are the usual culprits when "identical" strings refuse to match in code — strip both sides and compare again.
- Pair with the Line Sorter to clean and deduplicate exported data in one workflow.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a special character?
Anything outside the set you choose to keep. In letters-only mode, that means digits, punctuation, symbols, and invisible characters all go; in alphanumeric mode, letters and digits survive while everything else is dropped. Spaces are treated according to the mode, so check the output before assuming.
Why does text copied from PDFs need this?
PDF extraction often smuggles in non-standard characters: curly quotes, soft hyphens, ligatures like fi, and zero-width spaces that look identical to normal text but break string matching and database constraints. Stripping to a known character set is the reliable way to purge invisible troublemakers.
Is this the right tool for making safe filenames?
Yes — filesystems and upload handlers reject or mangle characters like /, ?, and :. Filtering to alphanumeric leaves a name that works on Windows, macOS, Linux, and every cloud service. For a hyphenated, URL-ready version instead, our Text to Slug tool is the better fit.
Will it remove accented letters like ñ or ü?
Accented characters sit outside the basic A–Z set, so strict filtering removes them along with symbols. If you need them converted to plain equivalents rather than deleted — ñ to n — run the text through a slugifier or transliteration step first, then strip the remainder here.