How to use the Text Cleaner

Paste the text you want to clean.
Tick the fixes you need. The cleaned text and the number of characters removed update instantly.
Copy the result.

Example

Input

This  line was
broken by a PDF   export.



Next paragraph.

Result

This line was broken by a PDF export.

Next paragraph.

Options used: collapse spaces, join wrapped lines, remove invisible characters, collapse blank lines.

About this tool

Invisible characters cause real problems: a zero-width space inside a word breaks search, a non-breaking space makes a spreadsheet treat a number as text, and a byte-order mark can break CSV imports. The “remove invisible characters” option deletes zero-width spaces and joiners, byte-order marks, soft hyphens and direction marks, and turns non-breaking spaces into normal spaces.

“Join wrapped lines” is designed for text copied from PDFs, where each visual line ends with a hard line break. It joins lines within a paragraph and keeps blank lines between paragraphs.

Known limitations

“Join wrapped lines” assumes a blank line separates paragraphs. Text where paragraphs are separated only by single line breaks will be merged into one paragraph.
Formatting such as bold, links and fonts is never preserved: the tool works with plain text only.
Straightening quotes also changes apostrophes, which is what most code and data formats need but not what typeset prose wants.

Frequently asked questions

How do I remove all line breaks?

Turn on “Join wrapped lines” and “Remove empty lines”. The text becomes a single block with spaces where the line breaks were.

Why does my text still look wrong after cleaning?

Some issues are not whitespace, such as hyphens left at the end of lines in PDFs (“exam- ple”). Those need checking by hand, because removing them automatically would also break genuine hyphenated words.

Is the original text kept anywhere?

No. The text stays in this browser tab and is not uploaded or stored.