What counts as punctuation here
The rule is inclusive rather than a fixed list: anything that is not a Unicode letter, a Unicode digit, or whitespace is deleted. That covers the obvious marks, periods, commas, colons, semicolons, question marks, exclamation marks, quotes of every shape, brackets, and dashes, and it also covers things people do not always think of as punctuation.
Currency symbols, mathematical operators, the at sign, the hash, the ampersand, underscores, pipes, backslashes, and emoji all fall outside the keep set and are removed. Smart quotes and typographic apostrophes go the same way as their straight equivalents, which is the usual reason a hand-written character list misses things.
After the removal pass, any run of two or more whitespace characters collapses to a single space and the result is trimmed. That cleans up the gaps left behind where a mark used to sit between two spaces.
- Kept: letters in any script, digits, single spaces
- Removed: all punctuation, symbols, currency, math signs, emoji
- Runs of whitespace collapse to one space
Marks are deleted, not replaced
This matters for two specific characters. An apostrophe is removed with nothing put in its place, so "don't" becomes "dont" and "it's" becomes "its". A hyphen behaves the same way, so "e-mail" becomes "email" and "twenty-one" becomes "twentyone".
That is the right behavior for most text-processing work: word frequency counts, search indexing, tokenizing, and building a keyword list all prefer the contraction glued together. It is the wrong behavior if you were expecting hyphenated compounds to split into separate words. There is no toggle for this, so if you need hyphens turned into spaces, replace them first with Find and Replace Text and then run this.
Because the keep set is Unicode-aware, non-English text survives properly. Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and CJK characters are all letters as far as the rule is concerned and stay exactly where they are.
A note about line structure
The whitespace collapse pass merges any run of two or more whitespace characters, and line breaks count as whitespace. A single line break between two lines survives, but a blank line between two paragraphs is a run of two breaks and becomes one space.
So a single-spaced list keeps its lines while a document with blank lines between paragraphs partially loses its structure. If keeping the layout matters, strip punctuation paragraph by paragraph, or accept the flattening and reformat afterward.
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