Special characters sneak into spreadsheets from everywhere. Pasted invoices, exported CRM fields, scraped web tables. They break your lookups and ruin your imports.
So you go looking for a formula to clean them out. That is where the trouble starts.
The Old Way (REGEXREPLACE)
The standard answer is a character class that keeps letters, numbers, and spaces.
=REGEXREPLACE(A1, "[^a-zA-Z0-9 ]", "")It works on plain English. Then it quietly destroys everything else.
That pattern deletes accented letters. "José" becomes "Jos". "Zürich" becomes "Zrich". "Ça va" becomes "a va". The regex does not know those are letters. It only knows they are not in your list.
Fixing it means hand-writing unicode ranges, which nobody enjoys.
=TRIM(REGEXREPLACE(A1, "[^a-zA-Z0-9 \u00C0-\u024F]", ""))And you still need the TRIM wrapper. Removing a hyphen from "well - done" leaves two spaces behind. The pattern also eats tabs and line breaks unless you exclude them, which can collapse a formatted paragraph into a wall of text.
The FITS Way (Describe What Counts as Junk)
With FITS, you say what you want gone. The AI already knows that é is a letter and $ is not.
=FITS("Remove punctuation and symbols from " & A1 & ", but keep accented letters and single spaces")Cleaning a phone number or an ID field? Be specific and get exactly that.
=FITS("Strip everything except digits from " & A1)No character classes. No escaping. No double space cleanup afterward. The formula reads like the request you would make to a coworker.
When to Use Each
REGEXREPLACE is free and instant when your data is pure ASCII and the rule never changes. Reach for =FITS() when the data is international, human-entered, or scraped. For the wider cleanup playbook, see the definitive guide to AI data cleaning or our messy data extraction guide. Stripping symbols is one item on a much longer list of jobs that used to demand a pattern. See them all in automating Google Sheets tasks you used to need regex for.
Stop Memorizing Character Classes
FITS puts plain-English AI formulas inside Google Sheets. Describe the cleanup. Get the clean cell. Free tier included.