Extract hashtags and mentions from text

Collecting hashtags and mentions in one go

Hashtags and mentions are how social networks connect posts and people, and they are buried in the text of every post. If you review a campaign, gather the tags used in a group of posts, build a list of accounts that were mentioned or reuse the tags of a caption in another network, you need them out of the sentences. Copying them one by one is tedious, and this tool extracts them all at once.

What is recognised

• Hashtags: a hash sign followed by letters, digits or underscores, including accented letters and non-Latin scripts, such as #Barcelona2026 or #café.
• Mentions: an at sign followed by a user name in the same characters, such as @utilsdock.

The text has to start the tag after a space, a line break or punctuation. For that reason, an at sign in the middle of an email address such as ana@site.com is not mistaken for a mention, and an ampersand entity such as ' is not read as a hashtag.

Useful ways to use the list

• Count how often each tag is used by leaving repeats in and sorting.
• Get the unique tags of a group of posts by removing repeats, and copy them separated by spaces to reuse them in a new caption.
• List all the accounts mentioned in a thread, without repeats, to thank or notify them.
• Check that tags are written consistently: turn on lowercase to see whether #Sale and #sale are being used as different tags.

What it does not do

The tool finds tags by their shape. It does not check that a hashtag exists, is popular or is safe to use, and it cannot tell whether a user name belongs to a real account. Hex colour codes such as #ff8800 look like hashtags and will be listed. Each network has its own rules on tag length and allowed characters, so a tag found here may not be valid on every platform.