Remove Arabic diacritics (tashkeel)

Fully vowelled Arabic, such as Quranic text, poetry or children's books, carries short-vowel and other marks above and below the letters. They are separate Unicode characters, so vowelled and unvowelled spellings of the same word do not match in search, spreadsheets, databases or spell checkers. This tool removes them and leaves the letters untouched.

By default it removes the combining marks U+064B–U+065F (fathatan, dammatan, kasratan, fatha, damma, kasra, shadda, sukun, and the less common maddah, hamza and subscript marks), the superscript (dagger) alef U+0670, and the Quranic annotation signs U+06D6–U+06ED, as listed in the Unicode Arabic code chart. The counts under the result show how many characters were removed.

Four further options are off by default because they change spelling rather than remove marks: removing tatweel (the kashida stretching character, U+0640), turning أ إ آ into bare alef ا, alef maqsura ى into yaa ي, and ta marbuta ة into haa ه. They are useful for building search indexes that match regardless of how a word was typed, but not for text people will read.