Accent Remover

How to remove accents from text

Paste it on the left, copy the plain version on the right. Nothing to set.

Every accented Latin letter becomes its base letter, and the letters that carry no separable accent are handled by a lookup rather than left alone.

The half of the job most tools skip

The standard recipe is one line: decompose the text and drop the combining marks. It works beautifully for é, ü, ñ and å, which really are a letter plus a mark once you take them apart.

It does nothing whatsoever for these:

In each of those the stroke, slash or hook is part of the letter's own code point rather than a mark sitting on top of it. There is nothing to decompose, so the standard recipe hands them back untouched and you find out when a filename or a URL still has a ł in it.

Of thirteen letters tested against the decompose-and-strip approach, nine came back unchanged. That gap is the whole reason this page exists.

Cyrillic and Greek are left alone on purpose

The obvious implementation strips every combining mark in the text. It is wrong, and wrong in a way you will not notice unless you read the script.

Cyrillic short i, й, decomposes to и plus a breve. Strip every mark and the word comes back with a different letter in it, one that sounds different and means something else. Greek loses its tonos the same way. Neither is an accent being removed; both are words being quietly broken.

So only marks sitting on a Latin letter are removed here. Paste a mixed document and the Russian in it comes out exactly as it went in.

What this is usually for

Filenames, URLs, database keys, import files, and any system that predates Unicode or pretends to.

If the destination is a URL, the slug generator is the better tool: it strips the accents and then does the lowercasing, hyphenating and punctuation dropping that a slug also needs.

If you are chasing a comparison that should match and does not, the Unicode normalizer is the one to reach for. Two strings can look identical and hold their accents differently, which is a different problem from having accents at all.

Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.