Free Text Cleaner
Clean up messy text in one click. Remove extra spaces, blank lines, tabs, trailing whitespace, smart quotes, and invisible characters. Free, no signup, works entirely in your browser.
How to Clean Text Online
1. Paste your messy text into the input box above. The tool accepts text of any length copied from PDFs, Word documents, emails, websites, spreadsheets, or any other source.
2. Choose your cleaning options. Toggle each option on or off. The defaults handle the most common issues: trailing spaces, collapsed multiple spaces, collapsed blank lines, tabs to spaces, and invisible Unicode characters.
3. Copy the cleaned output with one click. Or click "Apply to Input" to run additional cleaning passes on the result.
What This Text Cleaner Fixes
Collapses runs of multiple spaces into a single space. Fixes text pasted from PDFs, OCR tools, and formatted documents.
Removes invisible spaces and tabs at the end of every line. Essential for clean code, CSV files, and plain text.
Replaces three or more consecutive blank lines with a single blank line, keeping paragraph structure without excessive gaps.
Converts tab characters to single spaces. Fixes indentation issues from code editors, spreadsheets, and terminal output.
Converts curly quotes, em dashes, en dashes, and ellipsis characters back to their plain ASCII equivalents.
Removes non-breaking spaces, zero-width spaces, zero-width joiners, and byte order marks that cause hidden formatting issues.
Strips spaces and tabs from the beginning of each line. Useful for removing unwanted indentation from pasted code or email replies.
Strips all characters outside the standard ASCII range. Useful for cleaning text for systems that only accept basic English characters.
When to Use a Text Cleaner
Copying from PDFs: PDF text extraction often introduces extra spaces between words, line breaks at column edges, and invisible characters. Paste the raw text here and get clean output instantly.
Cleaning up code: Remove trailing whitespace, normalize indentation from tabs to spaces, and strip invisible characters that cause mysterious bugs.
Preparing data for spreadsheets: Clean text before pasting into Excel or Google Sheets. Remove extra spaces that cause duplicate entries, line breaks that split cells, and invisible characters that break formulas.
Email formatting: Clean up text from forwarded email chains. Remove excessive blank lines, trailing spaces, and inconsistent formatting.
Content migration: When moving content between CMS platforms, text often picks up invisible characters and inconsistent whitespace. Clean it here before importing.
Plain text files: Prepare text for README files, commit messages, configuration files, and other contexts that require clean, consistently formatted plain text.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does this text cleaner do?
It removes unwanted whitespace from your text including extra spaces, duplicate blank lines, tabs, trailing spaces, non-breaking spaces, and zero-width characters. You can toggle each cleaning option on or off to control exactly what gets removed.
Will this tool change my actual words?
No. The text cleaner only removes or replaces whitespace and invisible characters. It never changes your actual words, punctuation, or capitalization. If you also need to change case, use our Case Converter tool.
What are non-breaking spaces and zero-width characters?
Non-breaking spaces (\u00A0) look like regular spaces but prevent line breaks. Zero-width spaces are invisible characters that can cause problems when pasting text from websites, PDFs, or Word documents. This tool removes both.
Why does text copied from PDFs have extra spaces?
PDFs store text as positioned characters on a page, not as flowing text. When you copy from a PDF, the system tries to reconstruct the text and often inserts extra spaces, line breaks at column edges, and invisible characters. This tool fixes all of those issues.
What does 'straighten smart quotes' do?
Word processors like Microsoft Word and Google Docs automatically convert straight quotes ('" ) into curly smart quotes (“” ‘’). This option converts them back to straight quotes, which is essential for code, CSV files, and plain text formats.
Can I remove line breaks but keep paragraphs?
Yes. Use the 'Collapse blank lines' option (on by default) which keeps paragraph breaks while removing extra blank lines. If you want to join everything into a single paragraph, enable 'Remove all line breaks' instead.
Does this tool work on mobile?
Yes. The text cleaner is fully responsive and works on any phone, tablet, or desktop with a modern browser. Paste text from any app and copy the cleaned result.
Is my text sent to a server?
No. All cleaning happens in your browser using JavaScript. Your text never leaves your device. Nothing is stored or transmitted.
More Free Text Tools
Clean your text here, then convert the case with our converter or check the word count. All tools are free and process text in your browser.