What does the Remove Special Characters tool do?

It strips all characters that are not letters, numbers, or spaces from your text, leaving only clean alphanumeric content.

How do I remove special characters?

Paste your text and get the cleaned output instantly. Click Copy.

When should I use this?

Before importing text into databases that reject special characters, sanitizing user input, generating clean filenames, and removing formatting artifacts from pasted PDF text.

Does it remove spaces and numbers too?

No. Spaces and numbers are kept by default — only non-alphanumeric special symbols are removed.

Text Cleaning

Remove Special Characters — Strip Symbols from Text Instantly

Strip symbols, emoji, and non-standard characters, keeping only letters, numbers, and basic punctuation.

Input Text

0 words0 chars

Output Text

What Is Remove Special Characters?

Strip symbols, emoji, and non-standard characters, keeping only letters, numbers, and basic punctuation.

Special characters — symbols like @, #, $, %, &, and typographic characters like em dashes, curly quotes, and bullet points — often cause problems when text moves between systems. A product name with an ampersand breaks XML exports. A document with curly quotes fails JSON validation. A CSV field containing a special character corrupts spreadsheet imports.

This tool strips all non-alphanumeric, non-space characters from your text, leaving clean output safe for any system. Letters, numbers, and spaces are preserved; everything else is removed. It is a key step in data sanitization, URL slug preparation, and text normalization pipelines.

Example

Hello @World! #2024→Hello World! 2024

When to Use the Remove Special Characters

→Sanitizing user input before database storage — special characters in titles and descriptions can break SQL queries if not handled correctly
→Cleaning text for CSV and JSON export — special characters in field values require escaping; removing them prevents formatting corruption
→Preparing text for URL slug generation — URLs allow only letters, numbers, and hyphens; removing special characters is the first step before converting to kebab-case
→Normalizing product names for search indexing — search engines handle plain text better than text mixed with special characters
→Cleaning rich text copied from Word or Google Docs — pasted content brings curly quotes, em dashes, and decorative characters that break plain-text systems

How to Use the Remove Special Characters

Paste or type your text into the Input Text box.
The result appears instantly on the right.
Click Copy to copy the output to your clipboard.
Click Clear to reset and process new text.

Frequently Asked Questions

Everything you need to know about Remove Special Characters

Special characters are non-alphanumeric symbols in text — punctuation marks like !@#$%^&*(), emoji, accented letters, and other characters that are not standard letters or numbers.