File names, web addresses and some databases choke on accents, and sorting by name goes wrong when é and e are treated as different. The Accent Remover strips diacritics so café becomes cafe and Łódź becomes Lodz, and expands letters like ß into ss and æ into ae. Everything runs in your browser.
How to use it
- Paste the text with accents.
- Tick the extra option only if you also want other non-English characters removed.
- Read the cleaned text.
- Copy it.
When it helps
- Making URL slugs and file names from titles in other languages.
- Preparing names for a system that rejects accents.
- Building a search key that ignores accents.
- Cleaning an imported contact list.
Good to know
- Removing accents can change meaning in some languages, where an accent separates two different words. It's best for technical use, not for text people will read.
- Characters with no simple equivalent, such as ø or ł, are mapped to the usual English spelling.
- The "remove other non-English characters" option deletes characters outright, so check the output.
How accents are removed
Most accented letters can be written as a base letter plus a combining mark. The tool splits each character into those parts using Unicode normalisation, deletes the combining marks and puts the text back together. So é becomes e, ñ becomes n and ü becomes u.
Some letters aren't built that way, so they have their own rules: ß becomes ss, æ becomes ae, ø becomes o, and the Polish ł becomes l. Those substitutions follow the usual English spellings, but conventions differ by language and name.
Worked example: a shop's product list
A product list with names like "Crème brûlée", "Piña colada" and "Jalapeño poppers" becomes "Creme brulee", "Pina colada" and "Jalapeno poppers". That's what you want for file names and URLs, where accents can be encoded as long strings of percent signs.
The same trick helps with search. If someone types "cafe" and your data says "café", comparing accent-free versions of both makes the match. Store the original for display and the clean version for searching.
Cautions
Removing accents changes words in languages where they carry meaning. In Spanish, "año" (year) and "ano" (anus) are different words, and in French "où" and "ou" mean different things. For text people will read, keep the accents.
The extra option that removes all non-English characters deletes things like Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese and emoji, not just accents. Use it only when your destination really can't handle anything beyond basic characters.
Check names carefully
When processing people's names, keep the original spelling for display and use the accent-free form only for matching and file names. Respecting how someone writes their own name matters.
Questions
Which languages benefit most?
Any that add marks to Latin letters: French, Spanish, German, Polish, Turkish, Vietnamese and more.
Does it remove emoji?
Only if you tick the option that strips everything outside basic English characters.