Remove Punctuation

In short Removing punctuation deletes every punctuation mark while leaving words, numbers and spacing intact. It is a standard preprocessing step rather than an editing one: text analysis, word frequency counting, search indexing and machine learning pipelines all strip punctuation early, because "word," and "word" are the same token and treating them as different inflates every count. What it costs is sentence structure. Once the full stops are gone the sentence boundaries are gone with them, so anything that depends on sentences — readability scores, sentence counts, summarisation — has to happen before this step, not after. The order matters and getting it backwards is a common mistake. Two cases need a decision rather than a default. Apostrophes inside words are punctuation by any definition, and removing them turns "don't" into "dont", which some pipelines want and some do not. And hyphens in compounds join words that mean something together, so stripping them turns "state-of-the-art" into four tokens where there was arguably one.