Use the free Remove Accents from Text below: your data never leaves your browser — all work happens on your device, and nothing is uploaded to any server.
Why you would remove accents
Accented letters are correct and beautiful in their own languages, but many systems cannot handle them. An old database may store é as a broken character. A web address cannot contain accents safely. A username system may reject them. A search tool may treat “cafe” and “café” as different words. In those situations, stripping accents, turning é into e and ñ into n, is not disrespect for a language. It is a practical step to make text work where it has to work.
People meet this need constantly. They register an account and the form rejects their name. They build a file name and the system mangles it. They prepare data for a spreadsheet that only accepts plain letters. They generate a URL slug from a title in Spanish or French. In each case the fix is the same: a plain-letter version of the text, produced quickly and without retyping.
How this tool works
Paste your text and press Remove accents. The tool first handles special letters that do not decompose, like the German ß, which becomes ss, and the ligatures æ and œ, which become ae and oe. Then it applies unicode normalisation: it decomposes each accented character into its base letter plus a separate combining accent mark, and deletes the accent marks. What remains is the plain letter. The tool also reports how many characters it changed, so you can verify the result.
This method is exact, not approximate. It does not guess at characters or replace them with lookalikes. A letter either decomposes into a base letter plus marks, in which case the marks are removed, or it is handled by the special-case list, or it is left unchanged. Ordinary letters, numbers and punctuation are never touched.
What happens to specific letters
Spanish accents behave as you would expect: á, é, í, ó and ú become a, e, i, o and u, and ü becomes u. The letter ñ becomes n, which is worth knowing, because ñ is a distinct letter in Spanish, not just an n with a decoration. Removing its mark changes the word’s meaning in Spanish, so use the plain version only where a system forces you to, never as a substitute for correct Spanish writing.
French accents follow the same pattern: è, ê and ë all become e, ç becomes c, and ï becomes i. German umlauts become their base vowels: ä becomes a, ö becomes o and ü becomes u, rather than the ae, oe and ue forms that German itself uses when umlauts are unavailable. If you need the German ae form, add the e by hand after stripping. Scandinavian ø becomes o, Polish ł becomes l, and Danish å becomes a.
Where plain text is required
URLs are the most common case. A web address with accented letters may work in a modern browser but break in emails, older systems and printed material. The standard practice is to strip accents when building a slug from a title. Usernames and passwords are another case: many systems accept only basic Latin letters, and an accented character in a password can lock a user out on a different keyboard layout.
Data matching is a third case. If one database stores “José” and another stores “Jose”, a plain-text comparison will fail unless both sides are stripped first. Search systems face the same issue: a user searching for “cafe” should find “café”, and stripping accents on both sides of the search makes that work. File names on shared drives are a fourth case, since different operating systems handle accented file names differently.
What stripping does not do
Stripping accents loses information. In Spanish, “si” and “sí” are different words, and stripping makes them identical. In French, “ou” and “où” are different words too. A stripped text is a working copy for systems, not a replacement for the original. Always keep the original with its accents for anything a human will read as final text, and use the stripped version only where a system requires it.
Stripping also does not fix encoding problems. If your text already shows broken characters like mojibake, the original accents are already lost, and no stripper can recover them. In that case you need to fix the encoding of the source, not strip the result. And stripping does not transliterate other scripts: Chinese, Arabic and Cyrillic characters are left unchanged, because they have no plain Latin equivalent by this method.
Tips
Work on a copy and keep the accented original safe. Check the changed count: if it is zero, your text had no accents to begin with, even if it looked accented in another application, since formatting is not a character. If the count is unexpectedly high, look for characters you did not expect, like a non-breaking space or a hidden combining mark.
For URLs and file names, strip accents first and then replace spaces with hyphens and remove remaining punctuation, in that order. That sequence produces clean, predictable slugs. And remember that everything here runs in your browser: names, documents and private text are never uploaded to any server.