Arabic diacritic remover: questions and guides
Each guide here answers one question with a practical example, then takes you to the tool to try it yourself. Guides: 9.
Questions
- How to remove diacritics from Arabic textHow to remove harakat, tanwin, shadda and sukun from vocalized Arabic, choose exactly what goes, and why hamza letters and alef forms stay as they are.
- I'm adding search over Quranic verses on my site; which diacritic groups should I strip from the search copy while keeping the displayed text intact?Keep the displayed text untouched and build a copy for matching only. Default groups plus the superscript alef make الرحمن match; Uthmani sources need one more group.
- My vocalized Arabic message exceeds the SMS system's character limit even though it's short; will removing diacritics shorten it?Each vowel mark is a character of its own, so removing them cuts code points and bytes while the reader sees the same text. Real example: 32 code points down to 19.
- Is the text I paste to remove diacritics uploaded anywhere?No. Removal happens inside your browser, character by character, and the text is never uploaded or stored. Fine for book manuscripts, course notes and client documents.
- What's the difference between removing diacritics and normalizing hamza forms and ta marbuta, and which one does my store search need?Stripping diacritics removes vowel marks only, so أَحْمَد becomes أحمد, not احمد. Folding أ إ آ into ا and ة into ه is a separate step that changes spelling.
- The tool says it found more marks than it removed and that some were kept; why?Some groups are off by default, like the superscript alef in هٰذا, so their marks are counted but kept. How to read the counters, and when to turn the group on.
- After removing diacritics from a verse, the end-of-ayah sign around its number disappeared; what happened?The Quranic signs group includes visible signs: end of ayah, rub el hizb and sajdah. Turning it on removes content. Leave it off, its default, and the sign stays.
- The Arabic font in my design app draws diacritics overlapping and messy on my ad post; how do I remove them but keep only the shadda?Switch off the shadda group and leave the rest on: harakat, tanwin and sukun go while the shadda stays, so words like الصّيف remain clear. Real ad headline examples.
- The customer names column in one Excel file has diacritics and the other doesn't, so names don't match between the files; how do I fix it?Copy the names column, strip the diacritics and paste it back: مُحَمَّد عَلِيّ becomes محمد علي and matches. Line order is kept; hamza forms are not unified.