Gera Tools

Diacritic Stripper

Remove all accent marks: café becomes cafe, naïve becomes naive

Strip every accent and diacritical mark from text. Normalises to Unicode NFD form and removes all combining marks, turning accented letters into their plain ASCII bases. Runs entirely in your browser. It runs free in your browser on Gera Tools, with nothing uploaded.

Last updated Source: Gera Tools

What is a diacritic?

A diacritic is a small mark added to a letter to change its sound or meaning, such as the acute in café, the umlaut in naïve, or the tilde in mañana. Removing it leaves the plain base letter behind.

Diacritics are the accent marks added to letters, like the acute in café or the cedilla in façade. This tool removes every one of them, reducing accented letters to their plain base form so the text becomes pure ASCII.

How it works

The process relies on Unicode normalisation:

1. Normalise the string to NFD (canonical decomposition)
   é  →  e + ◌́   (base letter + combining acute U+0301)
2. Delete all combining marks in the range U+0300 – U+036F
   leaving just the base letters

In NFD form an accented character is stored as its base letter followed by a separate combining mark, so deleting the marks cleanly strips the accents without touching the underlying letters.

When you actually need this

The tool is more useful than it sounds — here are the situations where diacritic removal is genuinely necessary:

Filenames and file systems. Many operating systems handle accented filenames inconsistently between platforms. A file named Müller_résumé.pdf that looks fine on macOS may display as garbled characters or fail to copy on Windows FAT drives. Stripping to ASCII before saving removes the problem at source.

URLs and slugs. Web servers and content management systems that auto-generate URL slugs from page titles must convert Crónica del año to something URL-safe. This tool does the accent-removal step before the slug generator applies hyphenation — the two operations work together.

Legacy database fields. Older databases with VARCHAR columns in latin1 or ISO-8859-1 encoding reject characters outside that set. Normalising to ASCII before inserting avoids truncation or encoding errors in fields that store names, addresses, or search terms.

Full-text search matching. A user who types “cafe” into a search box should find “café”. ASCII-folding the search index so accented and unaccented versions of the same word hash together is one way to implement this. Strip the diacritics from both the indexed text and the query, then compare.

Sorting and comparison. Comparing strings across locales is fraught with accented-character edge cases. Stripping to a common ASCII base gives a simple, consistent sort order — useful for bulk processing where full locale-aware collation is overkill.

What the tool does not strip

This only removes separable combining marks in the Unicode combining diacritical marks block (U+0300–U+036F). Characters that are not decomposable into a base letter plus a combining mark survive unchanged:

  • The German ß (sharp s) has no NFD decomposition to s + a combining mark — it passes through as-is.
  • The Scandinavian ø (o with stroke) is a standalone letter, not o + a combining mark — it survives.
  • The Icelandic ð and þ similarly have no separable diacritical components.

If you need these mapped to ASCII equivalents (ß→ss, ø→o, ð→d), use a full transliterator rather than a diacritic stripper.

Example and tips

Crème brûlée à la française becomes Creme brulee a la francaise.

For a workflow combining this tool with slugification: strip diacritics here first, copy the result, then paste it into a slug generator. This two-step approach gives you predictable, clean URLs from any language that uses the Latin alphabet with accents.