Staaarter Tools

Word Symbol Wrapper

Wraps every word in your text with a chosen symbol on both sides, for example turning "hello world" into "*hello* *world*", useful for Markdown emphasis, tagging, or simple text decoration. A free online tool from Staaarter, right in your browser.

Runs locallyUpdated 2026-07-23
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Overview

Introduction

Wrapping every word in a passage with a symbol, like asterisks for emphasis or brackets for tagging, is fiddly to do by hand across more than a sentence or two.

This tool applies the wrap consistently across your whole input in one pass.

What Is Word Symbol Wrapper?

A tool that finds every word (any run of non-whitespace characters) in your text and places your chosen symbol immediately before and after it.

It runs entirely client-side as part of this site's String Tools collection, so nothing you paste is ever uploaded to a server.

How Word Symbol Wrapper Works

The tool matches every run of non-whitespace characters in the input and replaces each match with the symbol, the original word, and the symbol again, leaving whitespace between words unchanged.

The transformation happens synchronously in JavaScript the moment you type, with no network round trip involved.

When To Use Word Symbol Wrapper

Use it to apply Markdown emphasis (like *word* or **word**) across a whole sentence at once, or to add a custom tag or marker around each word.

It's a fast way to get the answer without opening a code editor, a REPL, or writing a one-off script just to check.

Often used alongside Word Symbol Unwrapper, Letter Symbol Wrapper and Find & Replace Tool.

Features

Advantages

  • Works with any symbol string, not just a fixed set of characters.
  • Applies consistently to every word in one pass, however long the input.
  • Wraps in a single pass over runs of non-whitespace, so the whitespace between words is left exactly as it was.

Limitations

  • Treats any run of non-whitespace as one word, so a word with attached punctuation (like "hello,") is wrapped including that punctuation.
  • Uses the same symbol at both ends, so it cannot produce asymmetric wrappers such as brackets or parentheses.

Examples

Wrapping with asterisks

Input

hello world

Output

*hello* *world*

Each word is wrapped on both sides with the default "*" symbol.

Best Practices & Notes

Best Practices

  • Use "**" as the symbol for Markdown bold, or "*" for Markdown italics/emphasis.
  • Trim stray punctuation from the input first if you want the symbol placed only around the letters, not the attached punctuation.
  • Strip trailing punctuation before wrapping when the symbol is meant as Markdown emphasis, since a comma caught inside the wrapper breaks the formatting.

Developer Notes

Word matching and wrapping is done in a single input.replace(/\S+/g, ...) pass, which is why any run of non-whitespace, including attached punctuation, is treated as one word rather than splitting on punctuation.

Word Symbol Wrapper Use Cases

  • Applying Markdown emphasis or bold formatting across a sentence
  • Tagging every word in a list with a custom marker
  • Building a simple decorated or stylized text effect

Common Mistakes

  • Expecting punctuation attached to a word to be excluded from the wrap; it's treated as part of the word.
  • Leaving the symbol field empty, which the tool rejects since there'd be nothing to wrap with.

Tips

  • Use the Word Symbol Unwrapper tool afterward if you need to reverse the wrap and get your original text back.
  • Use the Word Symbol Unwrapper with the same symbol to reverse the operation and confirm the round trip comes back clean.

References

Frequently Asked Questions