Remove Letters from Text

In short Removing letters deletes every alphabetic character and keeps the numbers, punctuation and symbols. It is the mirror of removing numbers, and it is used for the same kind of extraction from the other side — pulling the figures out of a report, isolating codes from a mixed field, or seeing what non-alphabetic content a file actually contains. For simply listing the numbers in a document, the extract-numbers tool is the better choice, because it returns them as a clean list with totals rather than as the original text with the words knocked out. This tool is for when the surrounding structure matters: keeping the punctuation shows how the figures were laid out, which is what you want when reverse-engineering a format. One thing to be aware of: what counts as a letter includes non-Latin scripts, so Arabic, Chinese and Cyrillic characters are removed as letters too. If you meant to remove only A to Z, run it on text that has already been reduced to ASCII.