Keep Only Letters Tool
Remove numbers, symbols, and special characters from your text while preserving only alphabetic letters. Perfect for data cleaning, text processing, and content sanitization with customizable options.
Keep Only Letters Tool
What is the Keep Only Letters Tool?
The Keep Only Letters tool is a powerful text processing utility that filters out all non-alphabetic characters from your text, leaving only letters A-Z and a-z. This tool is essential for data cleaning, text analysis, and content preparation where you need pure alphabetic content without numbers, symbols, or special characters.
Whether you're cleaning messy data, preparing text for analysis, or extracting meaningful content from mixed-format text, our tool provides flexible options to customize the filtering process according to your specific needs.
Key Features
Selective Filtering
Choose to keep or remove spaces and line breaks while filtering out unwanted characters.
Case Preservation
Option to preserve original capitalization or convert everything to lowercase.
Real-time Processing
See results instantly as you type or paste your text.
File Support
Upload text files directly or download processed results.
Statistical Analysis
View character counts and reduction percentages for your filtered text.
Privacy-Focused
All processing happens in your browser - no data is sent to servers.
Common Use Cases
Data Cleaning
Remove unwanted characters from datasets, CSV files, or database exports to prepare clean data for analysis.
Text Analysis
Prepare text for linguistic analysis, word frequency studies, or natural language processing tasks.
Content Extraction
Extract readable text from documents containing mixed content like forms, tables, or formatted text.
Academic Research
Clean research data, survey responses, or literature content for academic analysis and studies.
Web Scraping
Clean scraped web content by removing HTML entities, numbers, and symbols to get pure text.
Keyword Extraction
Prepare text for keyword analysis by removing all non-alphabetic characters and noise.
How to Use the Keep Only Letters Tool
Enter Your Text
Paste or type your text into the input field. You can also upload a text file using the "Upload File" button.
Configure Options
Choose whether to keep spaces, line breaks, and original case. These options help you customize the output to your needs.
View Results
The filtered text appears instantly in the output field. Review the statistics to see how much content was filtered.
Copy or Download
Use the "Copy" button to copy the result to your clipboard, or "Download" to save it as a text file.
Examples
Example 1: Basic Text Cleaning
Input:
"Hello World! This text has 123 numbers and @#$ symbols."Output (with spaces):
"Hello World This text has numbers and symbols"Example 2: Data Cleaning
Input:
"User123: John.Doe@email.com (555) 123-4567"Output (with spaces):
"User John Doe email com "Example 3: Programming Code Cleanup
Input:
"function calculateSum(a, b) { return a + b; }"Output (with spaces):
"function calculateSum a b return a b "Advanced Tips and Techniques
Preserving Text Structure
When processing documents or articles, keep both spaces and line breaks enabled to maintain readability and paragraph structure in your filtered text.
Data Analysis Preparation
For text analysis or word frequency studies, consider disabling case preservation to normalize all letters to lowercase, making analysis more accurate.
Batch Processing
For multiple files, process them individually and use the download feature to save each result. You can then combine the files using other text processing tools.
Quality Control
Always review the statistics panel to understand how much content was filtered. A high reduction percentage might indicate the need to adjust your filtering options.
Related Text Processing Tools
Remove Numbers
Remove only numeric characters while keeping letters and symbols.
Remove Punctuation
Strip punctuation marks while preserving letters and numbers.
Remove Extra Spaces
Clean up multiple spaces and normalize whitespace in text.
Strip HTML Tags
Remove HTML tags and extract plain text from web content.
Text Obfuscator
Hide or scramble text content for privacy or security purposes.
Frequency Analyzer
Analyze character and word frequency in your cleaned text.
Frequently Asked Questions
What characters are considered "letters"?
The tool recognizes standard English letters A-Z and a-z as letters. International characters with accents or diacritics are currently not included. For international character support, consider using our Convert Accented Characters tool first.
Can I process very large files?
The tool processes text in your browser& performance issues. For large files, consider breaking them into smaller chunks or using dedicated data processing software.
Why might I want to remove case preservation?
Removing case preservation (converting to lowercase) is useful for text analysis, searching, or when you want to normalize text for comparison purposes. It's commonly used in data science and natural language processing workflows.
Is my text data secure?
Yes, all text processing happens entirely in your browser. No data is sent to our servers, and nothing is stored or logged. Your text remains completely private and secure.
Can I undo the filtering process?
The filtering process removes characters permanently from the output. Always keep a copy of your original text. The tool shows you the original text in the input field, which remains unchanged during processing.
What file formats are supported?
The tool supports plain text (.txt) files for upload. For other formats like Word documents or PDFs, you'll need to copy and paste the text content directly into the input field.
Technical Details
The Keep Only Letters tool uses JavaScript regular expressions to identify and filter alphabetic characters. The core algorithm scans each character in the input text and applies the following logic:
- Characters matching /[a-zA-Z]/ are always kept
- Space characters are kept if "Keep spaces" is enabled
- Newline characters (\n, \r) are kept if "Keep line breaks" is enabled
- All other characters (numbers, symbols, punctuation) are removed
- Case conversion is applied after filtering if "Preserve case" is disabled
The tool provides real-time statistics including character counts, letter-only counts, and reduction percentages to help you understand the impact of the filtering process on your text.
Start Cleaning Your Text Now
Use our free Keep Only Letters tool to filter out unwanted characters and clean your text data. Perfect for data analysis, content preparation, and text processing tasks. No registration required.