Remove accents
Converts accented letters to their plain equivalents — é becomes e, not blank.
Press the button and accented letters become their base letters. The words stay readable, which is the whole difference between this and deleting characters.
Convert, do not delete
The common workaround for accents is to strip everything outside plain ASCII. Run that on "café" and you get "caf". Run it on "Müller" and you get "Mller". The word is destroyed rather than simplified, and in a list of names that is data loss you may not notice until someone complains.
This decomposes each character into its base letter plus its accent mark, removes the mark, and recombines. So é becomes e, ü becomes u, ñ becomes n, å becomes a, ç becomes c. Case is preserved: É becomes E.
It works across alphabets — Latin, Greek and Cyrillic accents are all handled — because it is based on the Unicode decomposition rules rather than a hand-written list of European characters, which is where most implementations stop and then quietly fail on the first Vietnamese or Polish name they meet.
The characters this cannot fix
Some letters are not accented versions of anything. German ß, Danish ø, Polish ł, Icelandic þ and ð are distinct letters in their own alphabets, not decorated forms of s, o, l or t, so decomposition leaves them as they are.
Converting those needs transliteration rules that differ by language — ß becomes ss in German, ø becomes oe in Danish, and there is no universal answer. If your target must be strictly ASCII, run the accent removal first, then handle the remaining letters deliberately with find and replace using the convention your language uses. The second button on this page strips whatever is left, but it deletes rather than converts, so check what it took.
Uses
- URLs and filenames. Accented characters in a URL get percent-encoded into something unreadable. For a full slug — lowercase, hyphens, transliteration of non-Latin alphabets — the slug generator does the whole job and is on this page as a button.
- Search and matching. A user typing "Munoz" should find "Muñoz". Normalising both sides is how that works.
- Deduplication. "José" and "Jose" are the same person in two records; comparison after accent removal finds that.
- Legacy systems. Databases and interfaces that predate Unicode and mangle accented input.
- Sorting. Some systems sort accented letters after Z, so a list comes back in a surprising order.
Doing it without this tool
Excel: no built-in function. SUBSTITUTE chains cover the accents you thought of and miss the
rest, and the nesting limit arrives quickly.
Word: nothing built in.
Command line: iconv -f utf-8 -t ascii//TRANSLIT, whose output depends on your locale settings
and is not consistent between systems.
JavaScript: s.normalize('NFD').replace(/\p{Diacritic}/gu, '') — the same approach this page
uses, which is the correct one.
Python: unicodedata.normalize('NFD', s) followed by filtering out combining characters.
Runs entirely in your browser. Your text is never uploaded — open DevTools, Network tab, and you will see zero requests while you use this tool.
How to use it
- Paste your text into the box.
- Press "Remove accents" — é becomes e and the word stays readable.
- If you need strict ASCII, handle letters like ß and ø deliberately, then strip anything remaining.
- For a URL, press "Make a URL slug" instead, which does the whole job at once.
Related tools
Frequently asked questions
Because that deletes the letter instead of simplifying it, turning café into caf and Müller into Mller. Converting keeps the word readable, which matters in lists of names.
No, and no accent remover can. Those are distinct letters rather than decorated ones, and converting them needs language-specific rules — ß becomes ss in German, ø becomes oe in Danish. Handle them with find and replace.
Yes. It uses Unicode decomposition rather than a fixed list of European characters, so accented letters in any alphabet are handled.
Yes, É becomes E and é becomes e. Only the accent is removed.
Use the slug generator instead — it removes accents, lowercases, replaces spaces with hyphens and transliterates non-Latin alphabets in one step.