Special characters — symbols, stray punctuation, control characters, or emojis — can cause formatting issues, corrupt data imports, and generally make content harder to use. Whether you maintain large lists, prepare data for CSV imports, or clean text copied from social media and PDFs, a focused tool that removes unwanted characters quickly is indispensable.
By default, the Remove Special Characters tool strips characters that are not letters, numbers, or whitespace. This includes: symbols like ©, ™, §; punctuation you may not want; emojis and pictographs; control characters; and other non-standard punctuation. Removing such characters helps when you're creating clean lists, preparing content for systems that only accept ASCII input, or sanitizing text before storing it in databases.
Not all use-cases require the exact same cleaning rules. That’s why this tool offers options: you can allow standard punctuation (commas, periods, parentheses), keep accented letters (useful for many languages), preserve newlines to keep paragraph structure, and even specify additional characters you want to retain (for example @ or /). There’s also a specialized action to remove only emojis when that's your primary concern.
Writers & editors: Clean copy before publishing to CMS or when pasting from documents that include stray symbols.
Developers: Prepare text for systems that expect ASCII-only input or to clean logs and config entries.
SEO & marketing: Remove unexpected characters that can interrupt meta descriptions or display in SERP snippets.
Data analysts: Sanitize exports and imports to avoid encoding errors or parsing problems.
Example 1 — Email lists: Clean pasted subscriber lists that sometimes contain stray symbols from copy/paste. Keep @ and - in the 'Allow additional characters' field.
Example 2 — CSV preparation: Convert NBSPs and remove control characters before importing into data tools to prevent parsing errors.
Example 3 — Social media cleanup: Remove emojis from scraped social posts before text analysis.
All text processing happens in your browser — nothing leaves your device. For typical use-cases performance is near-instant in modern browsers. Extremely large inputs depend on device capabilities but this tool is optimized for everyday content cleaning.
It removes non-alphanumeric characters, symbols, emojis, and other special characters by default, depending on options selected.
Yes — enable the 'Allow punctuation' option to preserve common punctuation marks.
Yes — use 'Remove Emojis Only' to strip emojis, or run the main remover to remove them along with other symbols.
Yes — enter @ or / (or any characters) into the 'Allow additional characters' field to keep them in the output.
By default, accents are removed under strict mode. Enable 'Keep accented letters' to preserve them.
No — the tool runs entirely in your browser; no uploads or storage.
By default, it preserves whitespace and line breaks. Use options to trim or collapse whitespace if needed.
Yes — processing is client-side, keeping your content private on your device.
Yes — removing stray symbols and NBSPs helps avoid parsing errors during import.
Yes — use the Undo button or paste the original text again.
No — it doesn't remove HTML tags. Use a separate HTML stripper if needed.
Modern browsers handle large inputs; very large files may be limited by device memory.
Yes — click the Download (.txt) button to save the output.
Yes — the UI is responsive and works well on phones and tablets.
Yes — Text Mini Tools provides it for free with no sign-up required.