What happens to apostrophes inside words?
They are removed like the rest of the punctuation: don't becomes dont. That is the behaviour word-frequency tools expect.
Remove Punctuation
Delete punctuation and symbols from text while keeping letters, digits, accents and line structure.
FeedbackKey Features
- Removes punctuation and symbol characters
- Keeps accented letters and every alphabet
- Preserves line breaks and word spacing
- Collapses the double spaces removal leaves behind
- Runs entirely in your browser
Benefits
- Prepare text for word-frequency and NLP work
- Normalize lists before comparing or deduplicating
- Clean OCR output that misreads marks as noise
- Strip decoration without touching the words
How to use this tool
Paste your text
Click Process
Copy the punctuation-free result
Removing punctuation without removing meaning
Stripping punctuation is normally a preparation step rather than an end in itself: preparing text for analysis, for a search index, for comparison, or for a system that only accepts letters and digits. The question is never whether to remove all of it, but which of it is carrying meaning in this particular text.
Apostrophes are the first decision. Removing them from contractions turns don't into dont, which is fine for a word-frequency count and wrong for anything a person will read. Removing them from possessives has the same effect. If the output is going to be read rather than counted, apostrophes usually stay.
Hyphens are the second. In a hyphenated compound the hyphen joins two words into one term, and removing it either fuses them into a word that does not exist or splits one term into two, changing what a search or a count will find. Neither outcome is neutral, and which one you get depends on whether the hyphen becomes nothing or becomes a space.
Full stops inside abbreviations, decimal points inside numbers, colons inside times, and slashes inside dates are all punctuation doing structural work. A blanket strip turns 3.14 into 314 and 9:30 into 930, which is the kind of change that survives unnoticed into a dataset and produces results nobody can explain later.
Sentence boundaries are worth considering before they vanish. Removing sentence-ending punctuation without replacing it with a space runs the last word of one sentence into the first of the next, creating tokens that never existed. Replacing each removed mark with a space avoids that at the cost of some double spaces, which a spacing pass then tidies.
For non-English text the definition of punctuation itself widens: full-width forms in Japanese and Chinese, Arabic question marks and commas, Greek question marks that look like semicolons. A rule built for ASCII will leave all of them in place, so text that looks unstripped after a pass is usually a script-coverage problem rather than a failure.
The processing happens in your browser tab and nothing is uploaded.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are non-Latin scripts safe?
Yes. Removal targets punctuation and symbol categories, not any particular alphabet, so Chinese, Arabic or Cyrillic text keeps all its letters.