🔤 Remove Accents from Text
By ToolNimba Text Team · Updated 2026-06-19
This tool removes accents and diacritical marks from text, turning words like café, naïve and jalapeño into cafe, naive and jalapeno. Paste your text and the plain, accent-free version appears instantly, ready to copy. Everything runs in your browser, so the text never leaves your device. Use it to clean up names for URLs, file names, database keys or search fields where accented characters cause trouble.
What is the Remove Accents Tool?
An accent, or diacritic, is a small mark added to a letter to change its sound or meaning, such as the acute accent in é, the tilde in ñ, the umlaut in ü or the cedilla in ç. Most accented letters are not stored as single special characters in modern text. Instead, Unicode lets the same visible letter be written as a plain base letter followed by one or more combining marks. The accent removal here works by forcing every character into that decomposed form and then deleting the marks, leaving only the base letters behind.
The key step is Unicode normalization. Calling normalize with the NFD form (Canonical Decomposition) rewrites each precomposed accented letter as its base letter plus separate combining mark code points. For example, the single character é becomes the letter e followed by a combining acute accent. Those combining marks all live in a known Unicode block, U+0300 to U+036F. A simple regular expression deletes every character in that range, so e plus the combining accent collapses back to a plain e. In code the whole operation is just text.normalize("NFD").replace(/[combining marks]/g, "").
Not every special letter is built from a base plus a mark, so NFD alone cannot handle them. Letters like the German eszett, the Scandinavian o with stroke, the ligature ae and the Polish l with stroke are separate code points with no decomposition, so this tool maps the common ones to sensible plain equivalents (ss, o, ae, l and so on) before normalizing. You can also choose to lowercase the result, and optionally drop any remaining non-ASCII characters when you need strict plain-ASCII output.
When to use it
- Cleaning names and titles before turning them into URL slugs, file names or email addresses where accented characters break things.
- Preparing data for systems, search indexes or legacy databases that only accept plain ASCII characters.
- Making text searchable so that a query for "resume" still matches an entry stored as "résumé".
- Standardizing imported spreadsheets or CSV files where the same word appears with and without accents.
How to use the Remove Accents Tool
- Type or paste the text you want to clean into the input box.
- Read the accent-free version in the result box, it updates as you type.
- Tick "Also convert to lowercase" if you want the output in lower case as well.
- Untick "Keep characters that have no plain form" to force strict plain-ASCII output.
- Click Copy to put the cleaned text on your clipboard.
Formula & method
Worked examples
You want to remove the accents from the French phrase "Crème brûlée".
- Start with the input: Crème brûlée
- NFD decomposition splits è into e + combining grave, and û into u + combining circumflex
- The regex deletes every combining mark in the range U+0300 to U+036F
- The base letters remain in place, spaces and casing are untouched
Result: Creme brulee
You need a plain version of the name "Jürgen Müller" for an email login.
- Start with the input: Jürgen Müller
- Each ü decomposes into u + combining diaeresis (umlaut)
- Deleting the combining marks leaves a plain u in each spot
- Optionally tick lowercase to get an all-lowercase login form
Result: Jurgen Muller (or jurgen muller in lowercase)
Common accented characters and their plain output
| Input character | Plain output | Mark or note |
|---|---|---|
| á é í ó ú | a e i o u | acute accent |
| à è ì ò ù | a e i o u | grave accent |
| â ê î ô û | a e i o u | circumflex |
| ä ë ï ö ü | a e i o u | diaeresis / umlaut |
| ñ | n | tilde |
| ç | c | cedilla |
| ß | ss | mapped separately (no decomposition) |
| ø | o | mapped separately (no decomposition) |
| æ | ae | mapped separately (ligature) |
Common mistakes to avoid
- Expecting eszett or stroked letters to work by themselves. Letters like the German ß or the Polish l with stroke are single code points with no Unicode decomposition, so NFD plus the combining-mark regex does nothing to them. This tool maps the common ones to plain equivalents, but a bare NFD approach would leave them unchanged.
- Forgetting that case is preserved. Removing accents does not change capital letters to small ones. An input of CAFÉ becomes CAFE, not cafe. Use the lowercase option if you also need the output in lower case.
- Confusing accent removal with transliteration. This strips marks from Latin letters, it does not convert other scripts. Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic or Chinese text is not turned into Latin letters, that is a separate process called transliteration.
- Using NFC instead of NFD. NFC (composition) does the opposite of what you want, it merges base letters and marks back into single accented characters. You must decompose with NFD before deleting the marks.
Glossary
- Diacritic
- A small mark added to a letter, such as an accent, tilde, umlaut or cedilla, that changes its sound or meaning.
- Combining mark
- A Unicode character (in the range U+0300 to U+036F) that attaches to the preceding base letter to form an accented letter.
- NFD (Normalization Form D)
- A Unicode normalization that decomposes each precomposed accented letter into a base letter followed by separate combining marks.
- NFC (Normalization Form C)
- The composing normalization that combines a base letter and its marks back into a single precomposed character.
- ASCII
- The basic 128-character set covering unaccented English letters, digits and common punctuation, used where accented characters are not allowed.
Frequently asked questions
How do I remove accents from text?
Paste your text into the input box and the tool shows the accent-free version instantly. Behind the scenes it uses Unicode NFD normalization to split each accented letter into a base letter plus its mark, then deletes the marks, leaving plain letters like cafe and naive.
What is the difference between an accent and a diacritic?
They mean almost the same thing. Diacritic is the general term for any mark added to a letter, and accent is the everyday word people use for it. Both cover acute, grave, circumflex, tilde, umlaut, cedilla and similar marks.
Does this change letters like ß, ø or æ?
Yes. These are single code points with no Unicode decomposition, so a plain NFD step would skip them. This tool maps the common ones to sensible plain forms, so ß becomes ss, ø becomes o and æ becomes ae before normalizing the rest.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. The entire conversion happens in your browser with JavaScript. Nothing is sent to a server, so the tool works offline once the page has loaded and your text stays private.
Will it convert other scripts like Cyrillic or Greek?
No. This tool only strips marks from Latin letters. Converting Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic or other scripts into Latin letters is transliteration, which is a different process and not what accent removal does.
Can I get strict plain-ASCII output?
Yes. Untick the option that keeps characters with no plain form, and any remaining non-ASCII characters are dropped after the accents are removed, leaving output that fits the basic ASCII set.