This removes punctuation marks, leaving letters, numbers and spaces.
Why remove it
Punctuation attaches to words and breaks comparisons. shoes, and shoes are different strings, so any matching or counting operation treats them as different terms.
Where it belongs in a sequence
Before tokenising, counting or comparing. Stripping punctuation is part of normalising text for analysis, alongside case folding and whitespace cleanup.
Not for text people will read
Stripped text is for machines. Keep the punctuated original for anything published.
Try it: Remove Punctuation on SeoWolf's Notepad.