How to remove special characters from text
Cleaning up a file name, feeding a post title into a database field or undoing a paste full of curly quotes and emoji all come down to the same job: drop everything that is not a plain letter or digit. Paste your text, tick the character types you want to keep, and the rest disappears.
The filter works by script rather than by a fixed blocklist. Basic Latin letters and digits are kept by default, and a separate switch keeps CJK characters — Hangul syllables and jamo, Japanese kana and Han ideographs — for text that mixes scripts. Leave that switch off and CJK text is removed along with the punctuation, which is what you want when the output has to be ASCII-safe.
Spaces and line breaks have their own switches. Turning spaces off runs every remaining character together, which is handy when building an identifier or a key. Characters are examined one code point at a time, so an emoji is never cut in half into a broken glyph; it is simply removed whole, as are accented Latin letters, since neither belongs to a kept category. Character counts also use code points, so one emoji counts as one character. Everything happens in your browser.
Frequently asked questions
Tick the CJK option. It covers Hangul syllables and jamo, Japanese kana and Han ideographs, and leaving it off removes them with the rest.
They are removed, because they do not belong to any of the keepable categories. Removal is done per code point, so no half-character leftovers appear.