Handles the letters NFKD cannot
Most accents are removed by Unicode decomposition, but letters like ß, ø, æ, þ and ł do not decompose. A dedicated table maps those to ss, o, ae, th and l so nothing is silently dropped.
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Remove Accents
Convert accented characters to plain ASCII — é to e, ß to ss, ø to o and more.
- Input
- No upload needed — instant
- Privacy
- Nothing is uploaded
- Cost
- Free · no sign-up · no watermark
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Overview
About the Remove Accents
Strip accents and diacritics from text, converting é, ñ, ü and ø to plain ASCII letters. Ideal for slugs, filenames and searches — runs entirely in your browser.
Accented letters are beautiful in prose and inconvenient in systems. A URL cannot legally carry an é without percent-encoding it into something unreadable, a filename with a diacritic trips up cross-platform sync, and a search index built on plain ASCII will not match “café” when the user types “cafe”. Folding accents to their base letters is the pragmatic fix.
How the folding works
The heavy lifting is Unicode NFKD normalisation, which decomposes a character like é into a plain e followed by a separate combining acute accent. Removing the combining marks leaves the base letter.
That handles most of Latin-1, but a group of letters has no decomposition — they are letters in their own right, not a base plus a mark:
A small lookup table covers these, so “Straße” becomes “Strasse” rather than “Strae” or “Straß”.
When to fold, when not to
Fold accents for machine-facing strings: URL slugs, filenames, database keys, search normalisation, CSV columns that must match across systems, and identifiers that are restricted to ASCII.
Do not fold accents as a way of “cleaning up” human-facing text. In Spanish, “año” (year) and “ano” are different words; in French, “du” and “dû” carry different meanings; removing a cedilla from “façade” is simply a spelling error. Diacritics are part of correct orthography, and stripping them from prose degrades it.
Pairing with other tools
Accent removal is usually one step in a pipeline. Fold the accents, then pass the result to the slug generator to get a clean URL segment, or lowercase it here and feed it into a case-insensitive comparison. Used that way it turns “Crème Brûlée — Recipe Nº 5” into something a filesystem, a database and a browser will all agree on.
Step by step
How to use the Remove Accents
Paste the accented text you want to transliterate.
Read the plain-ASCII result, which updates as you type.
Optionally switch on lowercase for slugs and filenames.
Copy the output or download it as a text file.
Why use it
Benefits and common use cases
What this tool is good for, and what it deliberately does not try to do.
Built for slugs and search keys
Accented characters break URL slugs, filename conventions and naive search indexes. Folding them to ASCII first makes “Crème brûlée” safe to use as “creme-brulee”.
Preserves other scripts
Only Latin diacritics and the special-case letters are folded. Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, CJK and emoji pass through untouched rather than being reduced to question marks.
Optional lowercasing
A single switch also lowercases the result, which is what you want when the folded text is headed for a case-insensitive match, a database key or a lowercase slug.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Short, honest answers about quality, limits and privacy.
What is the difference between an accent and a diacritic?
A diacritic is any mark added to a letter — the acute (é), the umlaut (ü), the tilde (ñ), the cedilla (ç). “Accent” is the everyday word for the same idea. This tool removes all of them and folds the letter back to its ASCII base.
Why does ß become “ss” instead of “b” or being deleted?
Because ß (the German sharp s) has no single ASCII equivalent; its established transliteration is “ss”. The same logic maps æ to “ae”, ø to “o”, þ to “th” and ł to “l” — a small table handles the letters that Unicode decomposition leaves alone.
Will it damage text in other alphabets?
No. Only Latin letters with diacritics and the handful of special Latin letters are converted. Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and emoji are passed through unchanged.
Does removing accents change the meaning of words?
In some languages it can: in Spanish “año” and “ano” are different words, and accents distinguish meaning in French and Portuguese. Use folding for technical keys — slugs, filenames, search normalisation — not as a substitute for correct spelling in prose.