Remove Non-ASCII Characters

What Is Remove Non-ASCII Characters?

Remove Non-ASCII Characters is a free online text-cleaning tool that removes characters outside the standard ASCII character set. ASCII, or American Standard Code for Information Interchange, defines a basic character set containing 128 character values, including English letters, numbers, punctuation, spaces and control characters.

The tool is useful when text needs to be restricted to standard ASCII characters for compatibility, testing, data preparation or systems that do not reliably support extended Unicode text. It provides a quick way to identify and remove characters such as accented letters, non-Latin characters, emoji and many Unicode symbols.

Why Use Remove Non-ASCII Characters?

Modern text frequently contains Unicode characters that are not part of the basic ASCII character set. Removing those characters can be useful when working with systems, datasets or test cases that specifically require ASCII-only content.

How to Use Remove Non-ASCII Characters

Use the tool to quickly create an ASCII-only version of your text by following these simple steps.

1. Enter your text — Paste or type the text you want to clean into the input box.
2. Select optional settings — Choose whether removed characters should become spaces and whether whitespace or empty lines should also be cleaned.
3. Remove non-ASCII characters — Select Remove Non-ASCII Characters to process the text.
4. Copy or download the result — Copy the ASCII-only result to your clipboard or download it as a plain text file.

Remove Non-ASCII Characters from Text Online

Removing non-ASCII characters can be useful when text must conform to a system that expects the traditional ASCII character set. Common examples include preparing test data, cleaning imported text, checking compatibility, simplifying sample datasets and creating controlled input for software testing.

Standard ASCII contains 128 characters, covering values from U+0000 through U+007F. This includes the English alphabet in uppercase and lowercase, decimal digits, common punctuation, whitespace and various control characters. Characters outside this range belong to the wider Unicode character space and are therefore removed by this tool.

Remove Accented Letters and Other Unicode Characters

Text copied from websites, documents and applications can contain accented letters and other Unicode characters even when the text appears visually similar to ordinary ASCII text. For example, é is a Unicode character outside the ASCII range. This tool removes it rather than attempting to guess a replacement.

Create ASCII-Only Text for Testing and Data Preparation

ASCII-only text can be useful for testing software that has strict character requirements. Developers and data-processing workflows can use the tool to create simplified test input, while content and data teams can use it when preparing text for systems with known ASCII-only requirements.

How Non-ASCII Character Removal Works

The tool checks each character in the supplied text and retains it when its character code falls within the standard ASCII range of 0 through 127. Characters with values above 127 are removed. This makes the result strictly limited to the standard ASCII character set.

Non-ASCII character removal is different from transliteration. The tool does not convert characters such as é into e, or convert non-Latin writing systems into Latin equivalents. If a character is outside the ASCII range, it is removed or replaced with a space when that option is enabled.

ASCII filtering can also remove emoji, accented characters, typographic quotation marks, en dashes, em dashes and other Unicode characters that may look similar to ASCII equivalents. Review the output carefully when the original text contains characters whose meaning or formatting is important.

Frequently Asked Questions