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Text Cleaner

Fix text copied from PDFs, emails, and word processors: straight quotes, single spaces, no hidden characters.

Cleaned live as you type. Nothing leaves your browser.

Cleaned text

Paste some text above to clean it up.

How to clean up messy pasted text

  1. Paste the messy text

    Drop in whatever you copied from a PDF, an email, or a word processor. The cleaned version appears straight away with every cleanup applied.

  2. Turn cleanups on or off

    Each fix is a separate toggle, so you can keep curly quotes but still strip hidden characters, or rejoin hard wraps without touching anything else.

  3. Copy the result

    Check the summary of what changed, then press Copy cleaned text to take the tidy version wherever it is going.

Why use this tool

Six cleanups, each independent

Straighten quotes and dashes, remove invisible characters, fix broken line breaks, collapse repeated spaces, trim whitespace, and join split accents. Every one toggles on its own.

Kills characters you cannot see

Zero-width spaces, soft hyphens, control codes, direction marks, and byte order marks are removed, and non-breaking or exotic spaces become plain spaces instead of vanishing.

Rejoins PDF line wraps

Lines that were hard-wrapped mid-sentence are stitched back into paragraphs, words hyphenated across a page break are rejoined, and blank line runs collapse to one gap.

Tells you what it changed

A summary counts every fix by category and shows how much shorter the text got, so you can see exactly what was wrong with the original.

Nothing leaves your browser

Cleaning happens on your device. The text is never uploaded, stored, or logged, and the tool is free with no signup.

About this tool

Text copied out of a PDF, an email client, or a word processor arrives carrying baggage. Quotes are curly, dashes are long, spaces are doubled, sentences are chopped into short lines by a layout that no longer exists, and the whole thing is peppered with characters that never render. This text cleaner runs six independent fixes over a paste and hands back plain, portable text you can drop into code, a form, a spreadsheet, or a CMS without anything breaking downstream.

The cleanups run in a fixed order so they cannot fight each other. Split accents are joined back onto their letters first, so an accented word compares equal to the same word typed normally. Invisible characters go next: zero-width spaces, soft hyphens, control codes, direction marks, and byte order marks are deleted, while non-breaking and exotic spaces become ordinary spaces so words do not fuse together. Then curly quotes, long dashes, ellipses, and symbols like the copyright and trademark marks are swapped for plain equivalents. After that, hard-wrapped lines are rejoined, repeated spaces and tabs collapse to one, and every line is trimmed at both ends.

Turn any step off when it does not suit the job. Writers keep curly quotes and use the tool only for invisible characters and spacing, while developers usually want everything straightened before pasting a string into code. Line rejoining is the one to watch: it joins a line only when the next line starts lowercase, which is right for prose and wrong for lists and poetry, so switch it off for those. Everything runs in your browser, so pasted drafts stay private, and the tool is free with no signup. For narrower jobs there are single-purpose tools: remove whitespace for spacing alone, remove line breaks for wrapping alone, invisible characters for inspecting hidden marks, and remove accents to flatten accented letters to plain ASCII.

Frequently asked questions

What does the text cleaner actually change?
Up to six things, each of which you can turn off: curly quotes, long dashes, ellipses and symbols become plain ASCII; invisible and control characters are removed; hard-wrapped lines are rejoined into paragraphs; runs of spaces and tabs collapse to one; lines are trimmed at both ends; and accents split from their letters are joined back on.
Why does text copied from a PDF break into short lines?
A PDF stores where each line sits on the page, not where a paragraph ends, so copying it gives you a line break at the end of every visual line. Fix broken line breaks rejoins those wraps whenever the following line starts with a lowercase letter, and rejoins words hyphenated across a page break.
Which invisible characters are removed?
Zero-width spaces and joiners, soft hyphens, control codes, left-to-right and right-to-left direction marks, word joiners, and the byte order mark. Non-breaking, en, em, thin, and ideographic spaces are converted to a normal space instead of being deleted, so words stay separated.
Will it change the meaning of my text?
No. Only formatting characters are touched, never words. The one fix that changes structure is line rejoining, which merges lines that were split mid-sentence. If you are cleaning a list, a poem, or code, turn that toggle off.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. The cleanup happens entirely in your browser. Your text never leaves your device and is not stored or logged, so it is safe for confidential documents. There is no hard size limit.

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