Remove Diacritics

What Is the Remove Diacritics Tool?

The Remove Diacritics tool strips accent marks and diacritical characters from letters, converting things like é, ñ, ü, and ç into their plain unaccented versions: e, n, u, c. It processes your entire block of text in one click, without touching anything else. The main use is preparing text for systems that do not handle accented characters well, or for creating slugs, IDs, or plain ASCII output from multilingual content.

It comes up regularly for developers working with URLs, filenames, and database entries, but also for anyone who needs to convert text from a language with lots of diacritics into something that plays nicely with older or more restricted systems. Some of those systems are more fussy about accents than you would expect.

How to Use This Tool

1. Paste or type your text into the input box above.
2. No settings needed. The tool identifies all diacritical marks in your text automatically when you run it.
3. Click Remove Diacritics and every accented character is replaced with its plain base letter. The rest of the text is left exactly as it was.
4. Copy the result using the Copy button, or select and copy manually. Use Clear to reset the input.

When Would You Use This?

Generating URL slugs or clean filenames from titles or names that contain accented characters, where the diacritics would either cause encoding issues or just look messy in a URL string.

Preparing names, addresses, or content for import into a legacy database, old CRM, or any system that only accepts ASCII characters and rejects or mangles anything with an accent.

Converting multilingual text into a plain-letter version for search indexing, sorting, or matching purposes, where you want "café" and "cafe" to be treated as the same string.

Examples

French text with acute and grave accents

Input   : café résumé crème brûlée
Output  : cafe resume creme brulee

Spanish text with tilde and acute accent

Input   : El niño está en la habitación
Output  : El nino esta en la habitacion

German text with umlaut

Input   : Müller Köln über Straße
Output  : Muller Koln uber Strase

Mixed accented names for URL slug generation

Input   : José García
Renée Dupont
Björn Ångström
Output  : Jose Garcia
Renee Dupont
Bjorn Angstrom

Frequently Asked Questions

What are diacritics?

Diacritics are marks added to letters to indicate a different pronunciation or to distinguish between words. Common examples include the acute accent (é), grave accent (è), tilde (ñ), umlaut (ü), cedilla (ç), and circumflex (â). They appear in many European languages and various other writing systems.

What does removing diacritics do to my text?

Each accented letter is replaced with its plain base letter. So é becomes e, ñ becomes n, ü becomes u, and so on. The rest of the text, including punctuation, spaces, and unaccented letters, is left unchanged.

How do I remove accents from text in Python?

A common approach is to use unicodedata to decompose the characters and then filter out combining marks: import unicodedata; ''.join(c for c in unicodedata.normalize('NFD', text) if unicodedata.category(c) != 'Mn'). For a quick one-off conversion, this tool is faster than writing the code.

How do I remove accent marks in Excel?

Excel does not have a native function for stripping diacritics. You can use a combination of nested SUBSTITUTE calls for each character you want to replace, but that gets long quickly. A macro or Power Query is cleaner for larger amounts of text. For plain-text content outside of Excel, paste it into this tool.

How do I convert accented characters to ASCII?

Paste your text into the input box and click Remove Diacritics. The output uses only the base ASCII letters with no accent marks. That is the most direct way to do it without writing a script.

Why would I need to remove accents from text?

Several reasons. URL slugs and filenames are cleaner without accents. Some databases and APIs only accept ASCII. Search matching is sometimes easier when diacritics are stripped so variations of the same word are treated as identical. Older software often handles plain ASCII more reliably than Unicode with combining characters.

Does this remove all types of accent marks?

It removes the most common diacritical marks: acute, grave, circumflex, tilde, umlaut, cedilla, and others that can be decomposed using Unicode normalization. Characters from scripts that do not decompose cleanly into a Latin base letter, like Arabic or Chinese characters, are not affected.

Will it change letters that do not have accents?

No. Only letters with diacritical marks are changed. Plain unaccented letters, numbers, punctuation, and spaces are all left as they are.

Can I use this to clean up names from a contact list?

Yes. If you have a list of names with accented characters that need to be in plain ASCII for a system import or filename, paste the list in and run the tool. Each name will have its accents stripped while the rest of the text stays intact.