complete.tools

Plain Text Converter

Turn styled, accented or fancy Unicode text into plain ASCII and see how many characters had no plain form and were dropped.

What this tool does

Turn styled, accented or fancy Unicode text into plain ASCII and see how many characters had no plain form and were dropped. You fill in these fields: Text to convert. It shows plain ASCII text, characters in, characters out, and characters dropped.

Inputs

  • Text to convert: Longer text, up to 100000 characters.

How to use

  1. Type the text to convert.
  2. Read the result: plain ASCII text, characters in, characters out, and characters dropped. It appears once every required field has a valid value.
  3. Use the copy button to copy the text.

Worked examples

Example 1. Inputs:

  • Text to convert: "Café Zoë"

Results:

  • Characters in: 8
  • Characters out: 8
  • Characters dropped: 0 (no plain form exists)

How this is worked out: Accents fold to the base letter (Unicode NFKD, then marks removed): é -> e, ë -> e. Characters: C a f é space Z o ë = 8 in, 8 out, none dropped.

Example 2. Inputs:

  • Text to convert: "𝐇𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐨 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝"

Results:

  • Characters in: 11
  • Characters out: 11
  • Characters dropped: 0 (no plain form exists)

How this is worked out: Mathematical bold letters decompose under NFKD to H e l l o and W o r l d. Characters: 5 + space + 5 = 11 in and 11 out.

Example 3. Inputs:

  • Text to convert: "“Hi” – it’s fine…"

Results:

  • Characters in: 17
  • Characters out: 19
  • Characters dropped: 0 (no plain form exists)

How this is worked out: Curly quotes -> straight quotes, en dash -> hyphen, ellipsis -> three full stops. In: “ H i ” space – space i t ’ s space f i n e … = 17. Out: " H i " space - space i t ' s space f i n e . . . = 19.

Example 4. Inputs:

  • Text to convert: "Hi 😀"

Results:

  • Characters in: 4
  • Characters out: 3
  • Characters dropped: 1 (no plain form exists)
  • Note: Some characters have no plain ASCII form, such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic or emoji, and were removed.

How this is worked out: H i space and one emoji code point = 4 in. The emoji has no ASCII form and is dropped, leaving H i space = 3 out.

Limitations

  • Converts characters only; it does not remove HTML tags, markdown symbols or formatting.
  • Characters with no ASCII form are removed, not transliterated, so non-Latin scripts disappear. Symbols such as the euro sign, the degree sign and bullets are removed too.
  • Counts are Unicode code points, so an accent typed as a separate combining mark, or an emoji built from several parts, counts as more than one character.
  • Accents and other combining marks are removed without being counted as dropped, including the vowel marks of scripts such as Hindi and Thai.
  • A character that becomes several, such as a ligature or the ellipsis, makes the output longer than the input.
  • Accepts up to 100000 characters at a time.

FAQs

Q: What does the converter change?
A: Accented letters lose their accents, styled letters such as mathematical bold or fullwidth become ordinary letters, ligatures are split, curly quotes become straight quotes, and dashes become a hyphen.
Q: What happens to characters with no plain form?
A: They are removed and counted under Characters dropped. This includes Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and emoji, which cannot be written in ASCII.
Q: Are spaces and line breaks kept?
A: Yes. Spaces, repeated spaces, tabs and line breaks are left as they are.
Q: Does it remove HTML tags or markdown?
A: No. It only changes characters. A tag such as <b> is already plain ASCII, so it is left untouched.

Explore Similar Tools

Explore more tools like this one: