Remove Punctuation API

About the Remove Punctuation API

A remove punctuation API for cleaning text before you analyze, index or compare it. Remove Punctuation strips all standard punctuation characters from text, including quotes, brackets, dashes, and special symbols, and returns clean text with single spaces between words, ready for word counts, tokenizers, search indexes or slug generation.

It handles more than the keyboard set: curly quotes, em and en dashes, ellipses, guillemets and inverted Spanish question and exclamation marks are removed too, which is where simple find-and-replace scripts usually miss. Emoji and currency symbols such as the euro sign are left alone, so the text keeps its meaning. Data teams use it to normalize survey answers and product titles, developers use it before matching user input against stored values, and NLP pipelines use it as a text cleaning step before tokenizing.

The Free plan returns the cleaned text. Paid plans also return the list of distinct punctuation characters that were removed and the total number of characters stripped, which is useful for auditing what a cleaning step changed.

How it works

Remove Punctuation matches two sets of characters in a single Unicode-aware regular expression. The first is the full printable ASCII punctuation and symbol set: ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . / : ; < = > ? @ [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~. That set includes ASCII symbols such as $, +, <, =, >, |, ~ and the underscore, so they are removed as well. The second is every character in Unicode's punctuation category (\p{P}), which covers curly quotes, em and en dashes, ellipses, guillemets, inverted marks and punctuation from other scripts.

Unicode symbols outside ASCII, such as emoji, the euro and pound signs and mathematical symbols, are not in the punctuation category and are kept. Letters, digits and whitespace are never touched. Apostrophes inside words are removed rather than replaced with a space, so "I'm" becomes "Im" and "don't" becomes "dont". Hyphens are removed the same way, so "well-known" becomes "wellknown".

After removal, every run of whitespace, including tabs and line breaks, is collapsed to a single space and the result is trimmed, giving cleaned. Text made only of punctuation returns an empty cleaned string. count is the total number of characters removed, counting repeats, and punctuation_removed is the list of distinct characters that were removed, sorted by code point. Both are null on the Free plan, where only cleaned is returned.

What people use it for

Text Analysis

Clean text data before performing word frequency analysis, sentiment analysis, or natural language processing

Search Optimization

Remove punctuation from search queries to improve matching and relevance in search systems

Data Normalization

Standardize text data by removing punctuation before comparison or deduplication

Content Processing

Clean user input or scraped content by removing punctuation for storage or display

Ways to call it

One endpoint, many ways in — REST with JSON, XML, YAML and CSV, plus GraphQL and an MCP interface for AI agents.

JSON

Default REST response

XML

Markup format

YAML

Human-readable

CSV

Tabular export

Beta

GraphQL

Query language

New

MCP

For AI agents

Request parameters — POST /v1/removepunctuation

Sent as JSON in the request body. Premium parameters are accepted on every plan but only take effect on plans that include them. Anything not listed here is dropped rather than passed through.

Required

1
2
3
4

curl -X POST "https://api.apiverve.com/v1/removepunctuation" \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"text":"Hello, world! How are you doing today? I'\''m great - thanks for asking. This text has lots of punctuation: periods, commas, hyphens & more!"}'

Authentication

Send your key in the x-api-key header. That is the only auth step — no token exchange, and no per-endpoint scope to configure.

Response — POST /v1/removepunctuation

Every APIVerve endpoint returns the same three top-level keys, so one response handler covers your whole integration: status, error and data. Only data changes shape.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

{
  "status": "ok",
  "error": null,
  "data": {
    "cleaned": "Hello world How are you doing today Im great thanks for asking This text has lots of punctuation periods commas hyphens more",
    "punctuation_removed": [
      "!",
      "&",
      "'",
      ",",
      "-",
      ".",
      ":",
      "?"
    ],
    "count": 11
  }
}

Response fields

Paths are relative to data. Premium fields are absent rather than zeroed on plans that do not include them, so check for presence instead of comparing to 0.

Response headers

Every response carries your balance, so your own code always knows where it stands without polling anything. All four are exposed to browsers through CORS.

Errors

Read the HTTP status first, then error for the specific reason. The body names the parameter that has to change.

What a call costs — 1 credits per call

Credits are shared across every APIVerve API — one balance, one key, one bill. Failed requests never count against it, so a rejected input costs nothing.

Calls are what the credits buy at this API's rate — spend them here, on any of the other APIs, or across both. Nothing is reserved per endpoint.

Zero-code embed — one snippet, no backend

Drop an interactive Remove Punctuation form onto any page. The widget calls the API for you, so no key ever appears in your markup and there is nothing to deploy.

Changelog — Remove Punctuation API

Every change to this endpoint, newest first. Breaking changes ship as a new version and the previous one keeps serving — response fields are added, never removed or retyped in place, so an integration written against v1 keeps working.

Currently v1