Remove Accents and Diacritics from Text
Turn é, ñ, ü, ç and other accented letters into plain Latin letters while capitals, spaces and punctuation stay as they are
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How it works
Paste your text in the left box and the version without accents appears on the right as you type: 'Crème brûlée at the café' becomes 'Creme brulee at the cafe'. Capitals stay capitals and lowercase stays lowercase; spaces, line breaks, digits and punctuation are not touched, so the output is still a normal sentence rather than a URL slug. Letters that Unicode can split into a base letter plus a mark (é, è, ê, ñ, å, ç, ş) lose the mark. Letters that cannot be split are mapped from a fixed table: ß → ss, æ → ae, œ → oe, ø → o, ł → l, đ → d, þ → th. For German names, set 'German ä ö ü' to 'ae' so that Müller becomes Mueller, which is how German spelling and passport machine-readable lines write it. The status line counts the characters that changed and lists anything that is still outside plain ASCII, such as the euro sign, an emoji or a Cyrillic letter, so you can deal with it before pasting into an old system.
This tool is also known as remove accents, remove diacritics from text, strip accents online, convert accented characters to english, unaccent text.
What is Diacritic (accent mark)?
A diacritic is a small mark added above, below or through a letter to change how it is pronounced: the acute in é, the grave in è, the tilde in ñ, the cedilla in ç, the umlaut or diaeresis in ü. Unicode can store such letters either as one precomposed character or as the base letter followed by a combining mark (normalization form NFD). Removing accents means decomposing the letter and dropping the combining mark.
What is ASCII?
ASCII is the 1963 character set of 128 codes: the 26 letters of the English alphabet in upper and lower case, ten digits, punctuation and control characters. It contains no accented letters at all. Because every computer system since the 1960s understands it, reducing text to ASCII is the safest way to get it through old software, strict form fields and the default GSM alphabet of SMS without corruption.
What is the difference between removing accents and making a slug?
Both turn é into e, but they produce different things. Removing accents keeps the text readable: capitals, spaces, punctuation and line breaks stay, so 'José García, Málaga' becomes 'Jose Garcia, Malaga'. A slug generator turns the text into part of a web address: it lowercases everything, replaces spaces with hyphens, deletes punctuation and outputs 'jose-garcia-malaga'. Use accent removal for SMS, name lists and legacy form fields; use a slug for blog URLs and file names.
Where do accents still break things?
Modern apps display accented letters without trouble, but a surprising number of places still accept only the 128 ASCII characters: legacy databases and ERP systems, bank transfer reference fields, shipping labels, old FTP servers and some e-mail usernames. Feed them 'José' and you may get 'José', a rejected form or a silently truncated name.
Text messages are the costliest case. A single á, ê or ş (letters missing from the GSM alphabet) switches an SMS from the GSM 7-bit alphabet to UCS-2, cutting the limit from 160 characters to 70. For bulk SMS that can double the number of billed segments.
What becomes what
Most accented letters are stored as a base letter plus a combining mark, so the tool removes the mark and keeps the letter. The rest come from a fixed table.
- é è ê ë → e, à á â ã → a, ñ → n, ç → c, å → a
- ä → a or ae, ö → o or oe, ü → u or ue (German option)
- ß → ss, æ → ae, œ → oe, ø → o, ł → l, þ → th
- Turkish ı → i and İ → I (dotless and dotted I kept apart)
- Cyrillic, Greek and emoji are left alone and reported
Frequently asked questions
Does it lowercase my text like a slug generator?
No. Capitals, spaces and punctuation stay exactly where they were; only the accent marks go. Use a slug generator if you need a lowercase, hyphenated URL.
Which German option should I choose?
For German names and addresses choose 'ae': German spelling and the passport machine-readable zone write Müller as Mueller. For text in other languages that happen to contain ö or ü (Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian) keep the default, which just drops the dots.
What happens to emoji and the euro sign?
They are kept, because they have no plain-letter equivalent. The status line counts every character still outside ASCII and shows the first few.
Is my text uploaded?
No. The conversion runs in your browser; the text never leaves this page.