What removing accents means
Removing accents turns text with diacritical marks into a plain version that uses only the basic Latin alphabet. “Résumé” becomes “Resume”, “São Paulo” becomes “Sao Paulo”, and “naïve” becomes “naive”. The letters and their order stay the same — only the marks drawn above or below each character disappear.
This tool does it instantly and entirely in your browser: paste your text, pick the options, and copy the clean result. Nothing is uploaded, so you can safely process private data without it ever leaving your device.
Why you would want to
Accented characters read beautifully, but they trip up systems that expect clean ASCII text:
- File names: a file called “Café Menu.pdf” can break when you zip it, upload it, or move it between Windows, Mac, and Linux.
- URLs and slugs: servers and search engines prefer addresses without diacritics; “quick-guide” is safer than an accented alternative.
- Databases and CSV files: a mis-encoded accent shows up as “é” or “” when you import or export data. Normalizing first prevents those glitches.
- Usernames and emails: many forms reject accents, and flattening the text makes matching far more reliable.
How to use the tool
- Type or paste your text into the first box.
- Turn on the options you need: convert ñ to n, strip punctuation, or make everything lowercase.
- Copy the result with the button. The counter shows how many characters changed.
By default the tool keeps the letter ñ, because in Spanish it is a distinct letter rather than an accented n.
How Unicode normalization works
Under the hood we rely on Unicode normalization. Every accented letter can be stored in two ways: as a single character (“é”) or as a base letter followed by a combining mark (“e” plus an acute accent). The NFD form (Normalization Form Decomposition) splits each letter into those two pieces. Once they are separated, we simply delete every combining mark — the Unicode range from U+0300 to U+036F — leaving only the base letters behind.
Worked example
Take the phrase “Canción Ñoño”:
| Step | Result |
|---|---|
| Original text | Canción Ñoño |
| Decompose (NFD) | Cancio + accent + n Ñoño |
| Strip combining marks | Cancion Ñoño |
Notice how the ó split into “o” plus an accent, and deleting the accent left “o”. The ñ, by contrast, stayed intact because we protect it before normalizing. If you switch on “convert ñ to n”, the result becomes “Cancion Nono”.
The ñ as a special case
Technically, the ñ also decomposes under NFD into an “n” plus a tilde, so a naive strip would turn it into “n”. That would be a mistake in Spanish, where “año” (year) and “ano” mean very different things. To avoid it, the tool sets the ñ and Ñ aside before normalizing and restores them at the end — unless you deliberately ask for the conversion with the checkbox.
Frequently asked questions
Does the tool keep the ñ?
Yes, by default it preserves it exactly, in both lowercase and uppercase. It is only converted to n if you tick “convert ñ to n”, an option meant for systems that cannot handle that letter.
Is it good for file names and URLs?
Absolutely — that is its most common job. It removes the accents that usually break links and file names. Combine it with strip punctuation and lowercase, and you get text that is ready to become a clean URL slug.
What is Unicode normalization?
It is a standard that defines how to compare and transform text consistently. The same word can be stored with different underlying codes; normalizing maps it to a common form and lets us separate letters from their accents reliably.
Does it work with other languages?
Yes. It handles any Latin-script text, stripping accents from French, Portuguese, or German. The German ß is not an accent, so it is left untouched.