Remove Emojis from Text

How to remove emojis from text

1. Paste or type your text into the Your text box, or click Open file to load a plain-text file. Click Example to try it on a sample post first.
2. Leave Tidy the spaces left behind ticked if you want the gaps left by deleted emoji closed up; untick it to keep every other character exactly where it was.
3. Leave Keep ©, ® and ™ ticked to keep copyright, registered and trademark signs, or untick it to remove them with the emoji.
4. The Result box updates as you type, and the note under it says how many emoji were removed.
5. Click Copy, Download .txt or Use as input, or send the clean text straight to remove special characters or the character counter.

Here is the built-in example with the default settings:

The note reads 7 emoji removed: two party poppers, a pizza, a burger, the clapping hands with its skin tone, the red heart and the US flag.

What counts as an emoji

An emoji is often more than one character under the hood. The Unicode emoji standard (UTS #51) builds many of them from sequences, and the tool removes each sequence as a whole and counts it once:

Removing the whole sequence matters. A simpler remover that deletes only the main pictograph can leave behind a lone skin-tone square, a zero-width joiner, invisible tag characters or a variation selector, which still count as characters and can break search and form validation. Stray U+FE0E and U+FE0F selectors, and zero-width joiners left before a space or the end of a line, are removed as well.

The rule is the Unicode property Extended_Pictographic. Unicode assigns it to every emoji and also to blocks reserved for future emoji, so emoji added after your browser was released are still caught.

Symbols that are removed and symbols that stay

Extended_Pictographic includes some older text symbols, not only colorful emoji. The tool follows the property, with one exception: the Keep ©, ® and ™ option. The line between removed and kept can be surprising (default settings unless noted):

So ♥, ✔ and ↔ go, while ★, ✓, ✗, → and math signs stay, and ©, ® and ™ stay unless you untick the option (or they carry the emoji selector, as in ©️). Other text symbols such as ♥, ☺, ✔, ☀ and ⌚ are always removed, because whether they appear as emoji depends on the font. Plain digits, # and * are kept unless they are part of a keycap emoji. Accented letters, Chinese, Japanese and other scripts are never touched. If you need to keep one of the removed symbols, delete only the emoji you want gone with the replace text tool instead.

Text emoticons (:-), <3) and kaomoji (¯\_(ツ)_/¯) are ordinary punctuation and letters, so they are kept. Shortcodes such as :smile: are kept too, because they are plain text until an app turns them into an emoji.

The Tidy the spaces option

An emoji usually sits between two spaces, so deleting it leaves a double space. With Tidy the spaces left behind ticked (the default), the tool only changes the spaces around each emoji it removed:

• Between two words, the spaces around a removed emoji (or a run of emoji) become one space.
• At the start or end of a line, they are removed.
• Before , . ; : ! ? ) or ], they are removed.
• All other spaces, tabs, indentation, line breaks and empty lines stay exactly as they were.

Before:
Line one 🙂
Line two 😀
  Indented 🎉 text

After, tidy on:
Line one
Line two
  Indented text

After, tidy off:
Line one 
Line two 
  Indented  text

More examples with tidy on:

Emoji with no spaces around them simply disappear, so words they separated are joined, as in Hotdeal. Existing double spaces elsewhere in the text are not touched; to collapse those and trim every line, pass the result to remove extra spaces. Untick the option when you want only the emoji characters removed and every space kept, for example in code or fixed-width tables.

When people remove emojis

• Publishing social posts elsewhere. A caption written for Instagram or TikTok often needs to become a press release, newsletter or website text where emoji look out of place.
• Cleaning data exports. Survey answers, reviews and CRM notes with emoji can trip up older databases and import tools or clutter keyword analysis. Remove them before importing or before running a word frequency count.
• Names and usernames. Display names copied from social profiles often carry flags or hearts that a form, mailing list or certificate cannot use.
• Text-to-speech and subtitles. Screen readers and voice tools can read emoji names aloud (“party popper”), which interrupts a script or an .srt subtitle file.
• Character limits. Emoji can count as several characters in some systems. Removing them, then checking the text in the character counter, shows how much room you gain.
• Hidden leftovers. If text still behaves oddly after cleaning, run the invisible character remover to find zero-width spaces and other characters you cannot see.

Known limits

• Font-dependent symbols. Symbols such as ♥, ☺, ✔ and ☀ are removed even when written as plain text, because many devices show them as emoji.
• Pictures and video. Emoji in an image or a video frame are not text and cannot be removed here.

Questions