The tool
What the accent remover does
Paste text and the accent remover strips the diacritical mark off every letter that carries one. Café becomes cafe, naïve becomes naive, jalapeño becomes jalapeno. The base letter is never touched, and nothing else in the text moves.
It runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, there is no length cap and no run limit, because no server is involved. That matters more here than on most tools, since the usual reason to strip accents is generating a key or a filename out of a real person's name.
How it works
How to remove accents from text in three steps
There is nothing to configure.
- Step 1
- Paste the accented text into the box.
- Step 2
- Run it. The result appears instantly, computed on your own machine.
- Step 3
- Copy the plain-letter version out.
The method
Decompose then strip: NFD in plain terms
Unicode can store an accented letter two ways. É can be one precomposed codepoint, or it can be a plain E followed by a separate combining acute accent, two codepoints that render as one glyph.
This tool applies NFD, canonical decomposition, which forces every letter into that second form. It then deletes every character in the Unicode Mark category, which is exactly the set of combining accents, and recomposes what is left with NFC. The base letter survives intact because decomposition separated it from its mark completely.
Scope
Accents in Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and Vietnamese
Most accent removers work from a Latin lookup table and stop at the edge of the Latin alphabet. This one removes marks by Unicode category, so it is not restricted to Latin at all.
Greek tonos comes off: Ελλάδα becomes Ελλαδα. Cyrillic loses its breve and diaeresis, so Й becomes И and ё becomes е. Arabic harakat and Hebrew niqqud are removed, leaving the consonant skeleton. Vietnamese, which stacks a vowel mark and a tone mark on one letter, comes out fully stripped: Tiếng Việt becomes Tieng Viet.
Whether you want that is a separate question. In Vietnamese and Arabic those marks carry meaning, so use this for technical fields rather than published prose in the language.
Stated honestly
Letters this accent remover leaves alone
Some letters look like an accented cousin of a plain letter but are structurally a separate letter, with no mark to separate off. Those pass through unchanged, and other pages in this category often claim otherwise.
- Ø and ø
- The Danish and Norwegian o with stroke. The stroke is part of the letter, not a combining mark, so it stays.
- Ł and ł
- The Polish l with stroke. Unchanged for the same reason.
- Đ, Ð and đ
- The Croatian, Icelandic and Vietnamese d with stroke. Unchanged.
- Æ, æ, Œ and œ
- Ligatures, not accented vowels. No decomposition exists, so nothing is removed.
- ß
- The German sharp s. It is a letter in its own right and does not become ss here.
- Å and å
- The exception that surprises people. The ring above is a combining mark, so this one does reduce to a.
Why it matters
Why remove accents from text at all
URL slugs are the common one. A slug generator that mishandles é produces a broken link or silently drops the character instead of transliterating it. Filenames are next: some filesystems and many export pipelines mangle accented characters into question marks or garbled bytes.
Then there is matching. Someone searching cafe should still find café, and someone typing a name on a keyboard without the right dead keys should still find the record. Storing both the original and the stripped form makes either query hit. The same reasoning applies to database keys, usernames, email local parts and programming identifiers, all of which are safer as plain ASCII letters.
Consequences
What accented characters actually break
Sorting is the quiet one. Under weak collation, é sorts nowhere near e, so a name list comes back in an order nobody expects. Legacy exports written in a single-byte encoding turn accented letters into replacement characters that cannot be recovered afterwards.
In spreadsheets, the same failure shows up as a lookup that misses. The two values look identical on screen but one holds a precomposed é and the other holds e plus a combining accent, and an exact match compares codepoints rather than glyphs. Running both sides through here makes them agree.
Who it's for
Who uses an accent remover and when
Developers building slugs, filenames, keys and identifiers out of user-entered text, where the source language is unpredictable and the target system is not. Data teams reconciling name lists imported from different systems with inconsistent accent usage.
Search and indexing work, where both forms need to exist so a plain-letter query finds an accented record. And anyone moving content into an older system whose character support is narrower than the text they have.