An old system rejects names with accents in a form. You need to generate a username or a URL from Spanish text, and the accented characters cause compatibility issues. A data processing script expects text with no diacritics to compare strings correctly. In all these cases, you need to strip accents from a text without rewriting it by hand.
Why this isn't as simple as "find and replace"
Manually finding and replacing each accented vowel (á, é, í, ó, ú) with its unaccented version, one at a time, is tedious but doable for a short text. The real problem shows up with accented uppercase letters (Á, É, Í, Ó, Ú), which many homemade implementations forget to cover, and with the diaeresis (ü), which also needs its own handling.
Why Ñ is a special case
Unlike accented vowels (which are variants of a base vowel with a diacritic mark on top), Ñ isn't "an N with an accent": it's its own independent letter in the Spanish alphabet, with its own meaning and sound, different from N. Stripping "the accent" from Ñ and turning it into N would change the meaning of many words (año → ano is the classic example everyone cites, and for good reason). That's why a good accent-removal tool should offer the option to keep the Ñ, treating it as the distinct letter it is, while only removing diacritics from vowels.
How to remove accents from text
- Paste or type your text.
- Choose whether to keep the Ñ or also convert it to N.
- Get the result with no accents instantly.
You can do it free with the remove accents tool on this site.
Common use cases
- Generating slugs or usernames: URLs and technical identifiers that shouldn't contain accented characters.
- Compatibility with old systems: forms or databases that don't handle extended Unicode characters correctly.
- Normalizing text for search: comparing text strings while ignoring accents, so a search for "jose" also finds "José".
- Preparing data for processing, where diacritics can cause inconsistencies when comparing or grouping values.
Frequently asked questions
Why should I keep the Ñ instead of removing it too? Because Ñ is its own letter in Spanish, not a variant of N with an accent; removing it changes the meaning of words.
Does this affect other languages with different accents than Spanish? It's mainly built for the common Spanish diacritics; other languages with different accentuation systems may need their own specific handling.
Are uppercase or lowercase letters lost when removing accents? No, the process only removes the diacritic mark, keeping whether the letter was uppercase or lowercase.
Is my text uploaded to any server? No, the entire process happens in your browser.
Remove accents from any text for free with the remove accents tool, keeping the Ñ if you need to.