Text Cleaner
Paste text copied from a PDF, a web page or an email, tick the fixes you want, and see exactly how many of each it made.
Paste or type up to 5 MB. It stays on this page: nothing is sent anywhere or saved.
Paste text above to clean it.
Everything happens on this page, on your device: your text is never sent anywhere or saved.
Tidy up pasted text
Text copied from a PDF, a web page, an email or a word processor often brings along things you can’t see: double spaces, non-breaking spaces, stray tabs, curly quotes that trip up code and data, and invisible characters that make two identical-looking words different. Tick the fixes you want, and the page shows how many of each it made.
How to use it
- Paste your text, up to 5 MB.
- Tick the fixes you want. The result and the counts update as you go.
- Check the result, then copy it or download it as a .txt file.
What each fix does
- Zero-width spaces and byte-order marks: removes U+200B and U+FEFF, which are invisible but stop searches and comparisons from matching.
- Non-breaking spaces: turns U+00A0 and the narrow U+202F into normal spaces.
- Curly quotes: “ ” and „ become ", and ‘ ’ and ‚ become ', as code and data files expect.
- Dashes: en dashes (–) and em dashes (—) become hyphens. It starts unticked, because dashes are usually there on purpose.
- Trim: removes spaces and tabs at the start and end of every line.
- Extra spaces: two or more spaces in a row become one, at the start of a line too.
- Tabs: each tab left becomes 1, 2, 4 or 8 spaces, which Extra spaces leaves as they are.
- Join lines inside paragraphs: for text with a line break at the end of every line, as copies from a PDF often have. Lines next to each other are joined with a space, and a blank line still separates paragraphs.
- Remove empty lines: drops blank lines, and lines with only spaces.
Good to know
- The fixes run in the order listed, and each count is what that fix changed.
- Your pasted text stays as it was in the top box, so you can untick a fix and compare the two.
- Zero-width joiners and non-joiners (U+200D and U+200C) are never removed: some writing systems and many emoji need them to display correctly.
- Joining lines also joins list items that aren’t separated by a blank line, and a word split by a hyphen at a line end keeps its hyphen.
- Want counts without changes? The Word and Character Counter counts words, characters, sentences and paragraphs and leaves your text as it is.
- Nothing leaves your device. Your text is never sent anywhere or saved.
Frequently asked questions
What are zero-width spaces and byte-order marks?
Invisible characters. A zero-width space (U+200B) marks a place where a line may break, and a byte-order mark (U+FEFF) sometimes starts a text file. Copied into the middle of text, they make words that look the same compare as different, which can break searches, formulas and code.
Why doesn’t it remove every invisible character?
Two of them do a real job. The zero-width joiner (U+200D) and non-joiner (U+200C) control how letters connect in some writing systems, and the joiner builds many emoji, such as families, out of simpler ones. Removing them would change how text looks, so this tool never touches them.
Why turn curly quotes into straight ones?
Word processors and phones often change typed quotes into curly ones. They look right in prose, but code, command lines, spreadsheet formulas and data files expect straight quotes, and a curly one there causes errors. Untick the fix to keep them.
Is my text sent anywhere?
No. It’s cleaned by this page’s own code, on your device, and nothing is sent, logged or saved. Reloading the page clears it, so copy or download the result first.