Remove Special Characters — Keep Letters and Numbers Only
Remove all special characters from text — keep only letters, numbers, and spaces for clean identifiers. Free, instant, client-side text cleaner.
🔒 100% Client-Side Processing
Your data is processed entirely in your browser and never transmitted to any server.
Input
Order #123 (rush) Output
Order 123 rush Punctuation is deleted while the spaces around it stay, so words do not run together where a symbol used to sit.
Common Use Cases
Sanitising filenames
Remove the characters that break file systems, uploads and shell commands, keeping only letters, numbers and spaces so the name survives every step of a pipeline.
Preparing search keys
Reduce product codes, SKUs and pasted user input to plain alphanumerics before fuzzy matching, so a stray dash or bracket cannot cause a false miss.
Cleaning text copied from a PDF
Strip the smart quotes, bullet glyphs and non-breaking characters that a PDF copy drags along invisibly, which otherwise fail validation in web forms and import scripts.
Generating a safe code from a label
Turn an arbitrary human label into a conservative alphanumeric token for a system that rejects anything else, without hand-editing each awkward character one at a time.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Which characters survive the cleaning?
- Letters a–z and A–Z, digits 0–9, ordinary spaces, and line breaks. Punctuation, brackets, currency symbols and emoji are removed outright. Accented letters are the exception: they fold to their ASCII base rather than vanishing, so café becomes cafe and Zürich Straße becomes Zurich Strasse. Deleting the letter along with its accent would quietly shorten a filename or search key built from non-English text. Because spaces survive, removing a symbol between two words leaves them separated rather than fused together.
- When is alphanumeric-only text needed?
- Sanitising file names and identifiers, preparing text for legacy systems that reject anything outside ASCII, cleaning pasted input before a simple search match, and generating conservative codes from arbitrary strings. It is the blunt option you reach for when you do not control what the consumer accepts.
- Are accented letters kept?
- Not as accented characters, but the letter itself survives — é folds to e, ü to u, and ß expands to ss, so nothing silently shortens. That matters for a search key built from a name: folding keeps Muller and Müller matching, while deleting the letter outright would turn Müller into Mller and break the match entirely.
- Does it remove hyphens and underscores?
- Yes. Both count as special characters here, so a-b_c collapses to abc. That makes this the wrong tool for building an identifier that needs separators — reach for a dedicated case converter, which keeps the word boundaries and joins them with the separator that convention expects.
- What happens to emoji and line breaks?
- Line breaks are preserved, so a multi-line block keeps its shape rather than collapsing into one paragraph. Emoji are removed entirely, including the invisible joiner characters inside composite ones, which can leave a double space where an emoji previously sat between two words.
- Is my data private when I use this tool?
- Yes. This tool runs entirely in your browser using client-side JavaScript — nothing you type is transmitted to, logged by, or stored on any server. You can safely process confidential text, tokens, or code.