Remove special characters from text (and generate clean URL slugs)

Split on an explicit delimiter list

The shown delimiter array handles eight selected characters: #, /, (, ), _, ordinary space, comma, and colon.

Passing an inline delimiter array {"#","/","(",")","_"," ",",",":"} to TEXTSPLIT breaks the text at every unwanted character simultaneously. Rejoining non-empty tokens with TEXTJOIN("", TRUE, ...) strips symbols completely, while TEXTJOIN("-", TRUE, ...) with LOWER builds SEO-friendly URL slugs.

URL slug and symbol-stripping formulas

TEXTJOIN's second argument (ignore_empty = TRUE) collapses adjacent punctuation like ": " or ") " into a single hyphen for these delimiters.

=LOWER(TEXTJOIN("-", TRUE, TEXTSPLIT(A2, {"#","/","(",")","_"," ",",",":"})))

Strip symbols without separators

Use "" as the TEXTJOIN delimiter to compact part numbers for matching.

=TEXTJOIN("", TRUE, TEXTSPLIT(A2, {"#","/","(",")","_"," ",",",":"}))

Inputs and interpretation

This is not a complete URL slug validator. Characters absent from the delimiter list, including existing hyphens, exclamation marks and Unicode characters, remain. Different inputs can collapse to the same slug. Choose a normalization/encoding policy, validate allowed characters and enforce uniqueness before using generated strings as routes.

Further reading

• Microsoft Support — TEXTJOIN function