The Diacritic (Accent) Remover can help you remove special (accent) characters from text. Simply copy and paste your diacritic-laden text into the left (first) textarea, and see the result in the second textarea. For quicker use, click on the 'copy' button below the second textarea to copy the formatted text.

We did this tool available to anyone for free. If we helped you don't forget to spread it to the world.

How Does the Accent Remover Work?

This tool converts any accented characters to their non-accented variants. The result of this conversion is in the 26-letter Latin alphabet.

Original:

En général, c'est à ce moment-là 
que je me rends compte que je suis en retard !

After Removing Diacritics:

En general, c'est a ce moment-la 
que je me rends compte que je suis en retard !

Why Do Accent Characters Exist?

A diacritic is an extra glyph added to a letter. These glyphs can be found in many languages such as French, Czech, Spanish, and so on. The name of this extra glyph, 'diacritic', comes from the ancient Greek word 'diakritikós' which can be translated to 'distinguishing'. The main purpose of a diacritic is to add some extra sound value to the original letter. There are few groups of accent glyphs which are used in many languages such as accents, dots, curves, and so on. Writing without using diacritics can result in invalid or non-official looking text.

The Computer Era

Diacritics look good and add some extra special vibe to text, but they are really painful for computers. Back in the days when computers didn't have much memory, they simply could not include all the glyphs required for every language. To limit the size of text, only the ASCII standard was used.

This standard used only the simple English alphabet and some special characters such as numbers, question marks, and so on. This was great for performance, but the problem with accents was not solved yet. The solution was to add multiple encoding standards for each language, and it quickly became a mess.

Have you seen something similar to this? I bet you have. This is the result of not using the right encoding. The text is decoded in the wrong language set.

ÉGÉìÉRÅ[ÉfÉBÉìÉOÇÕìÔÇ

The real solution to letters and glyphs came in 1991. It's called Unicode, the international standard of how text should be encoded. The Unicode Transformation Format, also known as 'UTF-8', is the encoding schema for all possible characters. Nowadays, it's widely used, and people don't have many text encoding issues anymore. But when you're trying to save some space, removing diacritics can be really helpful. And that's why we built this simple tool.