How to Remove Punctuation from Text (What Goes and What Stays)
Before counting words, building tags, or comparing two passages that look identical apart from punctuation, clearing the punctuation helps. But punctuation is not one set, and what gets removed changes the result a lot.
Open the tool：Remove Punctuation
When cleaning punctuation comes first
If a frequency count treats dog and dog. as two words, the output is useless. Removing punctuation lets the same word accumulate in one row. Tags, keywords and indexes behave the same way: punctuated variants split into several entries that are hard to merge once imported.
The other use is comparison. Two passages look the same except for punctuation, and you want to know whether the content is identical. Comparing them line by line after stripping punctuation is far more reliable than hunting for differences by eye.
- Cleaning text before counting words or keywords
- Building tags, indexes and glossaries
- Checking whether two passages differ only in punctuation
- Turning punctuated sentences into a word list
What is removed, and what survives
The removal set is fixed. From English it takes quotes, brackets, commas, full stops, colons, question and exclamation marks, slashes and underscores. From Chinese it takes the enumeration comma, full stop, semicolon, colon, question and exclamation marks, ellipsis, dash, curly quotes, parentheses and lenticular brackets. Letters, digits and spaces are kept.
Three exceptions are worth remembering. Hyphens are not on the list, so well-known survives intact. The full-width Chinese comma is not on the list either, so commas inside Chinese sentences remain. Japanese corner brackets, book-title marks and full-width percent or dollar signs also stay. Nothing is replaced with a space, so text without spaces around a comma ends up joined.
- English punctuation, underscores included, is removed
- Hyphens stay: well-known is unchanged
- Full-width commas and Japanese brackets stay
- No space is inserted, so English words can merge
Limits, and a more thorough approach
The list is fixed and cannot be edited. Emoji, mathematical symbols and full-width letters are outside it, and coverage of Chinese punctuation is incomplete. Treat this as the first pass of a cleanup, not the only pass.
For something more complete, filter by Unicode category: in Python, anything whose unicodedata.category starts with P is punctuation, which covers full-width, half-width and non-Latin marks. A custom regex replacing every non-alphanumeric character also works, at the cost of dropping meaningful symbols such as hyphens and apostrophes.
- The character list cannot be customised
- Chinese coverage is partial — check by hand
- Add spaces manually where English merged
- Thorough option: filter Unicode category P
FAQ
Why is the Chinese comma still there?
Because the full-width comma is not on the removal list. The tool removes English punctuation and a specific set of Chinese marks; the full-width comma, Japanese corner brackets and book-title marks are not in it. Replace them with half-width commas first if they should go too.
Why do English words run together afterwards?
Because removing punctuation inserts no space, so Hello,world becomes Helloworld. Replace punctuation with a space before removing it, or add spaces back afterwards with a regex that splits on word boundaries.
Does removing punctuation change the meaning?
Yes. Question marks, exclamation marks and quotation marks carry tone and boundaries, so a sentence can turn ambiguous and a quotation loses its extent. Fine for analysis, but keep the original for anything published and treat the output as a working draft.
Related tool：Remove Punctuation