Text Cleaner: Remove Extra Spaces and Blank Lines

Strip extra spaces, blank lines, line breaks and stray characters.

Text Tools Free, no sign-up Runs in your browser

Text Cleaner tool

Cleaning rules
No characters removed yet

About the Text Cleaner

Text pasted from PDFs, emails and web pages arrives carrying baggage: double spaces, hard line breaks in the middle of sentences, invisible non-breaking spaces and smart quotes that break code. Text Cleaner removes whichever of these you choose, in a single pass, and shows you how many characters were stripped.

Each cleaning rule is a separate switch, so you stay in control. Collapse repeated spaces into one. Trim the space at the start and end of every line. Delete empty lines. Join lines into a single paragraph by removing hard breaks. Convert smart quotes and dashes to plain ASCII. Strip characters outside the normal printable range, including the zero-width characters that sneak in from web copy.

Sensible defaults are switched on when the page loads, so for most messy pastes you can simply paste and press Clean text. Everything happens in your browser, so confidential documents are safe to clean here.

How to use the Text Cleaner

  1. Paste the messy textDrop in whatever you copied from a PDF, email or web page.
  2. Choose your cleaning rulesTick only the fixes you want. The common ones are on by default.
  3. Press Clean textThe cleaned version appears below with a count of characters removed.
  4. Copy the clean versionTake it with the copy button or download it as a .txt file.

Features

  • Collapse repeated spaces and tabs
  • Trim whitespace at the start and end of each line
  • Remove empty lines
  • Remove hard line breaks to rejoin paragraphs
  • Convert smart quotes and dashes to plain ASCII
  • Strip invisible and zero-width characters
  • Optional removal of all punctuation and symbols
  • Shows how many characters were removed

Who uses this tool

The text cleaner is used by writers, developers, students, marketers and anyone else who needs the job done once without installing software. Common cases include:

  • Cleaning text copied out of a PDF before editing it
  • Removing hard wraps from an email quote
  • Stripping smart quotes that break code or CSV files
  • Normalising user-submitted content before publishing
  • Removing invisible characters that break database imports

Frequently asked questions

What are zero-width characters and why remove them?

They are invisible characters such as the zero-width space and the byte order mark. They are copied along with text from many websites and can break search, string comparison and CSV imports even though nothing looks wrong on screen.

Will removing line breaks ruin my formatting?

It joins separated lines into continuous paragraphs, which is what you want for text that was hard-wrapped by an email client. If your text is a list where every line matters, leave that option switched off.

What does the smart quotes option change?

Curly quotation marks, curly apostrophes and en or em dashes are replaced with their plain ASCII equivalents. This is essential when pasting text into code, config files or systems that expect plain characters.

Does the special character option delete letters in other languages?

The strict option removes anything outside the standard printable ASCII range, which includes accented letters and non-Latin scripts. Leave it off when working with text in languages other than English.

Is my text sent to a server?

No. All cleaning happens in your browser, so you can safely clean contracts, drafts and client documents.

Can I undo a clean?

The original text stays in the input box, so nothing is lost. Change the options and run it again to produce a different result from the same source.

If the text cleaner is not quite what you need, these other free tools solve closely related problems.

Remove Duplicate Lines

Deduplicate any list of lines, with case-sensitive and empty-line options.

Text Tools Use tool

Word Counter

Live word, character, sentence and paragraph counts with a reading-time estimate.

Text Tools Use tool

Case Converter

Convert any text to UPPERCASE, lowercase, Title Case, Sentence case and more.

Text Tools Use tool

Text Sorter

Order any list A-Z, Z-A, by number, by line length, or simply reverse it.

Text Tools Use tool

Character Counter

Character, word, line and paragraph counts that update as you type.

Text Tools Use tool