Remove special characters across a whole Word document with a wildcard Find and Replace, or paste the text into the tool below to clean a passage instantly. Both keep letters, digits and spaces.
Use Find and Replace with wildcards turned on:
Open Find and Replace with Ctrl+H, then:
1. Click "More" and tick "Use wildcards"
2. Find what: [!0-9A-Za-z ]
3. Replace with: (leave empty)
4. Click "Replace All"
The pattern [!0-9A-Za-z ] matches every character that is
not a letter, digit or space, so all of them are deleted.Just need it for a snippet of text? Paste it into the tool above instead of running Find and Replace on the whole document.
Open Find and Replace (Ctrl+H), click More and tick Use wildcards, set Find what to [!0-9A-Za-z ], leave Replace with empty, and click Replace All. That deletes every character that is not a letter, digit or space.
Turn off File > Options > Proofing > AutoCorrect Options > Straight quotes with smart quotes, then use Find and Replace to swap the existing curly quotes for straight ones, or paste the text into the tool above to convert them all at once.
Same job in another tool: Python, JavaScript, Excel, Word or SQL.
Remove Special Characters