Utilities
Clean Up Text
Clean messy text by removing extra spaces, blank lines, line breaks, HTML tags, special characters, and whitespace.
About the text cleaner
Text copied out of a PDF, a web page or a chat app tends to bring junk along: double spaces, stacks of empty lines, hard line breaks in the middle of sentences and leftover HTML tags. Paste it in, tick what should go and the cleaned version appears underneath as you change the options. Apply selected writes the result back into the box so you can keep working, and Copy puts it on your clipboard. Remove extra spaces turns any run of two or more spaces or tabs into one space. Remove blank lines squeezes three or more line breaks in a row down to a single empty line, so paragraphs stay apart. Remove line breaks joins all lines into one block, which repairs PDF text broken mid-sentence but also merges paragraphs. Remove HTML tags deletes anything between < and >, while entities like & stay as they are. Trim whitespace clears spaces and line breaks at the very start and end. Remove special characters is the blunt one. It keeps the letters A to Z, digits, underscores, whitespace and basic punctuation (. , ! ? ; : ' " ( ) and the hyphen) and deletes everything else, including emoji, accented letters, curly quotes and symbols like @, # and €. The options always run in the same order, HTML tags first, and all of it happens in your browser.
Frequently asked questions
Will it remove emoji?
Only with Remove special characters ticked, and that option takes a lot more than emoji with it: accented letters such as é and ü, curly quotes, long dashes and symbols like @, % and €. Leave it off unless your text is plain English.
Can it turn smart quotes into straight quotes?
No. There is no option that converts them, and Remove special characters deletes curly quotes outright. Use Find & Replace instead: paste a curly quote into Find, type a straight one into Replace and click Replace all, once for each kind of quote.
How do I fix a PDF paste where every line ends early?
Tick Remove line breaks and Remove extra spaces, then click Apply selected. The lines join into one paragraph with single spaces. If the original had several paragraphs, clean them one at a time, because this option joins paragraphs as well.
Why are there still blank lines after Remove blank lines?
On purpose. The option collapses a run of three or more line breaks to two, which leaves one empty line between paragraphs. A line holding only a space or a tab doesn't count as empty either, so it stays.