Sometimes you need the words and nothing else. A word list for a game, text prepared for a frequency count, lyrics to line up against a transcript, a caption that has to be plain letters because the platform mangles anything else. Stripping punctuation by hand, one comma at a time, is the kind of job that takes two minutes for a paragraph and an afternoon for a document.
Paste your text and the punctuation disappears from the result. Letters, numbers, spaces and line breaks stay where they were.
Apostrophes and hyphens
This is the one setting that changes how the output reads, so it is worth understanding. With “Keep apostrophes and hyphens inside words” ticked, “don’t” stays “don’t” and “well-known” stays “well-known”. The tool only strips an apostrophe or hyphen when it is not sitting between two letters, so a quote mark around a word goes, and the one inside a contraction stays.
Untick it and every mark goes. “Don’t” becomes “dont”, which is how plenty of search indexes and word lists treat it anyway. Choose whichever matches what you are feeding the result into.
What is punctuation and what is a symbol
Unicode splits these apart, and so does the tool. Full stops, commas, colons, brackets, quotation marks, dashes and the like count as punctuation, in every script. Characters such as $, +, =, <, > and ^ are classed as symbols and are left alone unless you tick “Also remove symbols”.
Things that break
Removing punctuation is blunt, so check the result in these cases:
Decimal numbers lose their point: 3.14 turns into 314. Email addresses and web links collapse into a smear, because the @, dots and slashes all go. Abbreviations such as “e.g.” turn into “eg”. And sentences run into each other, since the full stop was the only thing marking where one ended. If you need the sentences intact for later, split first with the text splitter and clean afterwards.
If your real goal is to keep only letters and digits, remove special characters is a stricter cousin that also drops symbols and emoji. If numbers are the thing you want gone, see remove numbers.
A common pipeline
For keyword work: strip punctuation here, take out filler words with remove stop words, and feed what is left into the word frequency counter. The ten most common words are usually a good summary of what a text is about.