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REGEXREPLACE
REGEXREPLACE finds all occurrences within a text string that match a regular expression pattern and replaces them with a specified replacement string. It is a Google Sheets-only function used for advanced text cleaning — such as removing punctuation, stripping HTML tags, normalising whitespace, or masking sensitive data.
Excel
=SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A2,"!",""),"?","")Google Sheets
=REGEXREPLACE(A2,"[^a-zA-Z0-9 ]","")✓
Verified example
Computed by a real spreadsheet engine on the sample data below.
| Raw Text | Cleaned |
| Hello, World! | Hello World |
| Price: $9.99 | Price 999 |
| Name (2024) | Name 2024 |
| test@email.com | testemailcom |
=SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A2,"!",""),"?","")→Hello, World
Try it with your data
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Sample data — click any cell to edit
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How it works
- 1In Google Sheets, identify the cells containing text you want to clean and define a regex pattern for what should be removed or replaced.
- 2Enter =REGEXREPLACE(A2,"[^a-zA-Z0-9 ]","") to strip all characters that are not letters, digits, or spaces.
- 3Supply a non-empty replacement string to swap matched patterns: =REGEXREPLACE(A2,"\s+"," ") collapses multiple spaces into one.
Need a version for your data?
Try: “Remove all special characters from a column of product descriptions”