Remove Non-ASCII Characters

Non-ASCII characters are any characters beyond the basic ASCII range (0-127), including accented letters (é, ñ, ü), special symbols (©, ®, ™), non-Latin scripts (中文, العربية, кириллица), and extended Unicode (emoji, mathematical symbols). You might need to remove them for several reasons: Legacy database compatibility - Many older MySQL databases only support ASCII or Latin-1 encoding and cannot store UTF-8 characters properly. API constraints - Some APIs reject or corrupt characters outside ASCII range. CSV/Excel issues - Non-ASCII characters can break CSV parsing and cause display errors. Cross-platform compatibility - Ensuring text works across systems that don't support Unicode. File naming - File systems have different Unicode support, ASCII filenames are universally compatible.

The tool offers three quick presets for common scenarios: Remove All - Strips ALL characters outside the basic ASCII range (0-127). This is the most aggressive mode and leaves only standard English letters, numbers, and basic punctuation. Use this when you need absolute compatibility. Keep Common Symbols - Removes non-ASCII characters but preserves commonly used symbols like © (copyright), ® (registered trademark), ™ (trademark), § (section), ° (degree), ± (plus-minus), × (multiplication), and ÷ (division). Perfect when you need legal/technical symbols but want to remove accents and foreign scripts. ASCII Only - This is the strictest mode, removing even control characters and keeping ONLY printable ASCII (space through tilde, plus newlines/tabs). Use this for pure text with no special formatting or control codes. Choose the preset based on your compatibility needs and what characters you can afford to keep.

Range Mode gives you granular control over which character ranges to remove, organized by type: Extended Latin (128-255) - Characters like é, ñ, ü, ç, and other accented letters in Western European languages. Accents - Diacritical marks and accented characters specifically. Symbols - Special symbols like ©, ®, ™, §, °, etc. Control Characters (0-31) - Non-printable control codes (except common ones like space, tab, newline). High-bit Unicode (256+) - All characters beyond the Latin Extended range, including emoji, Asian scripts, Cyrillic, Arabic, etc. You can check/uncheck each category independently. For example, to remove only emoji and Asian text while keeping European accents, you'd enable 'High-bit' but disable 'Extended' and 'Accents'. This gives you surgical precision over what stays and what goes.

Smart Encoding Detection automatically analyzes your text and provides intelligence about its encoding complexity. It counts non-ASCII characters and calculates what percentage of your text uses special encoding. The tool displays different alerts: Green '✅ Pure ASCII' - No non-ASCII characters detected, your text is already clean. Blue '✨ X characters detected' - Found 1-50 non-ASCII characters, a moderate amount. Orange '⚠️ Heavy encoding detected' - Found 50+ non-ASCII characters, suggesting the text has significant international content or emoji. The detection also shows the exact count and percentage, like '127 non-ASCII chars (23.5%)'. This helps you understand your text's composition before processing and choose the right removal strategy. For heavily encoded text (>20%), the 'Remove All' preset is usually recommended for maximum compatibility.

Yes! The tool supports both File Upload and Batch Mode: File Upload - Click 'Upload' to load .txt or .md files directly. Perfect for processing large documents, CSV exports, or log files. The tool reads the file content and processes it immediately. Batch Mode - When enabled, the tool processes each line of your text independently. This is essential for: CSV data cleaning - process each row separately while preserving structure, Log file sanitization - clean multiple log entries, Bulk text processing - handle lists of items where each line is a separate entity. Batch Mode ensures line breaks are preserved and each line gets its own processing pass. This prevents issues where removing characters from one line affects another. After processing, use the 'Save' button to download the cleaned result as a .txt file. The filename includes a timestamp for easy organization (e.g., 'ascii-only-1642534567.txt').

Highlight Changes mode provides a visual diff that shows exactly which characters were removed from your text. Removed non-ASCII characters appear with: Red background - Makes them stand out clearly, Strikethrough styling - Shows they've been removed, Unicode tooltip - Hover over a highlighted character to see its Unicode code point (e.g., 'U+00E9' for 'é'). This visual feedback is incredibly useful for: Quality Assurance - Verify the right characters were removed before saving, Learning - Understand which characters are considered non-ASCII, Debugging - Identify unexpected non-ASCII characters in your data, Documentation - Show stakeholders what changed for compliance or audit purposes. The highlighting works in both normal view and Comparison Mode. In Comparison Mode, you see the original and cleaned versions side-by-side, with the cleaned version optionally showing highlights. This transparency ensures you always know exactly what's being modified.

Character Exceptions let you specify individual non-ASCII characters you want to keep even when using removal modes. Simply type or paste the characters you want to preserve in the Exceptions field. For example: Keep copyright/trademark - Enter '©®™' to preserve these legal symbols even with Remove All mode, Keep degree symbol - Enter '°' for temperature/angle measurements, Keep currency - Enter '€£¥' to preserve currency symbols, Keep accented names - Enter 'éñü' to keep specific letters in proper names. The exceptions are honored across ALL removal modes, both preset and custom range modes. This gives you complete control: you can use aggressive removal settings while selectively preserving critical characters. Common use cases: keeping © in copyright notices, preserving ± in scientific data, maintaining € in financial reports, or keeping specific accented letters in brand names or author names. Just paste the exact characters you need - the tool handles the matching automatically.

When non-ASCII characters are removed, they often leave behind extra spaces that can make text look unprofessional and cause data issues. For example, 'Hello © 2024' becomes 'Hello 2024' with awkward double spaces after removing ©. The Whitespace Normalizer automatically: Collapses consecutive spaces - Multiple spaces become single spaces, Trims leading/trailing whitespace - Removes spaces at start/end of each line, Preserves line breaks - Keeps paragraph structure intact. Enable this alongside non-ASCII removal for clean, publication-ready output. This is essential for: Database storage - Prevent extra spaces in database fields, CSV files - Avoid parsing issues from irregular spacing, Professional documents - Ensure proper formatting, API payloads - Meet strict formatting requirements, Search/comparison - Ensure consistent spacing for matching algorithms. The normalizer works in both normal and Batch Mode, cleaning each line individually when batch processing.

The tool displays 5 comprehensive metrics in real-time: Input Length - Total characters in your original text, useful for knowing starting size. Output Length - Characters remaining after removal, shows final size. Chars Removed - Exact count of characters stripped from the text, helps quantify the cleaning. Non-ASCII Count - How many non-ASCII characters were in the original text (even if not all were removed due to exceptions). Saved % - Percentage reduction in text size, calculated as (removed / input × 100). These statistics help you: Measure impact - See how much non-ASCII content was in your text, Validate processing - Confirm the right amount was removed, Track efficiency - Understand storage/size savings, Make decisions - Compare different removal strategies. The stats update automatically as you type or change settings, giving you instant feedback. For example, if you see only 2% reduction, your text was mostly ASCII already. If you see 30% reduction, there was significant non-ASCII content that needed cleaning.

While related, they serve different purposes: Remove Accents tool - Typically replaces accented characters with their base equivalents (é → e, ñ → n, ü → u). The text length stays roughly the same, just simplified. Useful when you want readable text but need to remove diacriticals. Remove Non-ASCII tool - Completely strips characters outside ASCII range, leaving gaps or relying on whitespace normalization. More aggressive and used for strict compatibility. Our Remove Non-ASCII tool is more powerful because: Greater control - 5 character range controls vs simple accent removal, Preservation options - Character exceptions let you keep specific symbols, Broader scope - Removes ALL non-ASCII (emoji, symbols, foreign scripts) not just accents, Smart detection - Analyzes encoding complexity automatically. Use this tool when you need strict ASCII compliance for legacy systems, APIs, or file formats. Use an accent removal tool when you want readable simplified text while maintaining most content. For maximum flexibility, use both strategically: remove accents first to preserve readability (café → cafe), then remove remaining non-ASCII characters to ensure compatibility.