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.

How does the stripping work?

The text is normalised to Unicode NFD form, which separates each accented character into a base letter plus a standalone combining mark. The tool then deletes every combining mark in the U+0300 to U+036F range, leaving only base letters.

Will it break non-Latin scripts?

It only removes combining diacritical marks. Letters that are single code points without a separable accent, such as most Cyrillic or CJK characters, pass through unchanged. Latin letters with accents are the main target.

Why would I need accent-free text?

Plain ASCII is safer for filenames, URLs, search indexes, legacy databases, and systems that mishandle Unicode. Stripping diacritics also helps match accented and unaccented spellings of the same word.

Diacritic Stripper — Gera Tools

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.

Example and tips

Crème brûlée à la française becomes Creme brulee a la francaise. Note this only removes separable combining marks: a few characters such as the German ß or the Scandinavian ø are single letters, not base-plus-accent, so they survive — use a transliterator if you need those mapped too.