What does a text cleaner remove?
Text copied from PDFs, web pages, Word and chat apps often carries formatting residue that you cannot see but that causes real trouble: double spaces that fail a style check, line breaks in the middle of sentences, and invisible characters that break search, sorting and form fields. The Text Cleaner finds these and removes them in one pass.
The options, one by one
| Option | What it does | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Extra spaces | Collapses runs of spaces and tabs to one space and removes spaces at line ends | On |
| Extra blank lines | Turns three or more line breaks into one blank line | On |
| Hidden formatting | Removes zero-width characters, soft hyphens, BOM and control characters; turns non-breaking and other special spaces into plain spaces | On |
| Trim | Removes whitespace at the very start and end of the text | On |
| Join broken lines | Joins single line breaks inside a paragraph into spaces; blank lines are kept | Off |
| Straight quotes | Converts curly quotes to straight quotes | Off |
How to remove line breaks from copied text
PDFs usually break a line at the end of every printed line, not at the end of a paragraph. Switch on join broken lines: single line breaks become spaces, and the blank lines between paragraphs survive. If your whole text then needs one paragraph, remove the blank lines with the Find and Replace tool using a regular expression.
What it does not do
The cleaner changes whitespace and invisible characters only. It does not fix spelling, grammar or wording, and it does not remove bold, italics or links as such, because plain text in the editor has none. For mistakes in the words themselves, run the Spell Checker or the Grammar Checker afterwards. If a hyphen at a line end is a real hyphen, the tool leaves it; only the invisible soft hyphen is removed.
Limits and privacy
All cleaning runs in your browser with a small script, so there is no upload and no fixed length wall; very large pastes are limited only by your device. The Before and After figures count characters, so you can see how much was removed. Always read the result once before you submit it, because joining lines can merge a heading with the paragraph below it.