Text Cleaner

Clean and format text instantly. Remove extra spaces, line breaks, HTML tags, special characters, and invisible characters. Perfect for data cleaning, content formatting, and text processing.

Professional Text Cleaning for Perfect Formatting

Text rarely comes in perfect condition. Whether you're copying content from PDFs, cleaning data from spreadsheets, processing user input, or preparing text for databases, unwanted characters, extra whitespace, and formatting inconsistencies create problems. Our Text Cleaner is your comprehensive solution for transforming messy, poorly formatted text into clean, consistent content ready for any use.

From removing invisible Unicode characters that break searches to stripping HTML tags from web content, from eliminating duplicate lines in data files to normalizing whitespace in pasted text—our tool handles every text cleaning challenge. All processing happens instantly in your browser with real-time preview, ensuring your data remains private while delivering professional results in seconds.

How to Clean Your Text

Paste Your Text

Copy and paste the text you want to clean into the input area. This can be messy content from PDFs, web pages, Word documents, databases, spreadsheets, or any source with formatting issues. The tool handles text of any length.

Select Cleaning Options

Choose which cleaning operations to apply: remove extra spaces, strip HTML tags, clean special characters, eliminate line breaks, remove invisible characters, delete duplicate lines, or normalize whitespace. Multiple options can be applied simultaneously.

Preview Results

See your cleaned text in real-time as you adjust options. Compare the original and cleaned versions side-by-side. View statistics showing characters removed, lines processed, and percentage of text cleaned.

Copy or Export

Click the copy button to add cleaned text to your clipboard instantly, or export as a text file. The processed text is ready to paste into documents, databases, spreadsheets, or any application requiring clean, formatted content.

Import from Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides

Clean text directly from your Google Workspace documents! Import from Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides with a simple public link. Perfect for cleaning formatted content before processing.

For Public Documents

Open your Google Doc, Sheet, or Slide
Click "Share" in the top-right corner
Click "Change to anyone with the link"
Set permission to "Viewer"
Click "Copy link"
Paste the link in our Google Import field

For Private Documents

Private documents require authentication and cannot be imported directly. To clean private content:

Open the document and select all text (Ctrl+A / Cmd+A)
Copy the content (Ctrl+C / Cmd+C)
Use the "Paste" button in our tool to insert the text

Privacy Note: When importing public Google documents, the content is fetched through a proxy service and processed entirely in your browser. We don't store or log any imported content.

Comprehensive Text Cleaning Features

Whitespace Cleaning

Remove extra spaces, tabs, and multiple consecutive line breaks. Normalize all whitespace to ensure consistent formatting throughout your text.

HTML Tag Removal

Strip all HTML tags from web content while preserving the visible text. Perfect for cleaning pasted content from websites and editors.

Special Character Filter

Remove or preserve specific special characters, punctuation, symbols, accents, and diacritics based on your requirements.

Invisible Character Removal

Detect and remove zero-width spaces, soft hyphens, non-breaking spaces, and other invisible Unicode characters that cause hidden problems.

Duplicate Line Removal

Automatically identify and remove duplicate lines from your text, keeping only unique entries. Essential for cleaning lists and data files.

Encoding Fix

Repair common encoding issues like smart quotes, em dashes, and Unicode problems that occur when copying text between applications.

Common Text Cleaning Tasks & Solutions

Problem	Cause	Solution	Tool Feature
Extra Spaces	Multiple spaces between words	Replace multiple spaces with single space	Remove Extra Spaces
Line Break Chaos	PDF copy, email formatting	Normalize line breaks and paragraphs	Remove Line Breaks
HTML Tags	Pasted from web pages, CMS	Strip all HTML while keeping text	Strip HTML Tags
Invisible Characters	Unicode, zero-width spaces	Remove all invisible characters	Clean Invisible Chars
Smart Quotes	Word processors, rich text	Convert to straight quotes	Fix Encoding
Duplicate Lines	Data imports, merged files	Keep only unique lines	Remove Duplicates

Professional Use Cases

Data Processing & Migration

Clean imported data from CSV or Excel files
Prepare text for database insertion
Remove encoding issues from legacy systems
Standardize data formats across sources
Clean user-generated content before storage

Content & Document Management

Clean text copied from PDF documents
Remove formatting from pasted content
Prepare text for CMS platforms
Standardize document formatting
Clean content for translation services

Web Development

Extract plain text from HTML content
Clean user input before processing
Sanitize form submissions
Prepare text for API requests
Remove formatting from rich text editors

SEO & Content Marketing

Clean competitor content for analysis
Remove formatting from keyword research
Prepare content for plagiarism checking
Standardize meta descriptions and titles
Clean scraped content for insights

The Hidden Problem of Invisible Characters

Invisible characters are Unicode characters that don't display visibly but exist in your text, causing numerous problems that are difficult to diagnose. Understanding these characters is crucial for maintaining clean, functional text data.

Common Invisible Characters

Zero-Width Space (U+200B): Often inserted by text editors or copied from web pages. Breaks word searches and causes unexpected line breaks.
Zero-Width Non-Joiner (U+200C): Used in some languages for text rendering but causes problems in databases and search systems.
Zero-Width Joiner (U+200D): Connects emoji sequences but can break text parsing when copied between systems.
Soft Hyphen (U+00AD): Invisible hyphen suggesting where words can break. Causes word searches to fail.
Non-Breaking Space (U+00A0): Looks like a space but isn't treated as one by systems, breaking word counting and alignment.
Byte Order Mark (BOM - U+FEFF): Used in file encoding but becomes visible when copying text between applications.
Left-to-Right/Right-to-Left Marks: Control text direction but cause formatting chaos when mixed with regular text.

Problems Caused by Invisible Characters

Search Failures: Searching for "example" won't find "example" (with zero-width space). Database queries fail, site searches break, and users can't find content.

Comparison Errors: Text that looks identical fails equality checks. "hello" ≠ "hello" causes authentication failures, duplicate detection to miss duplicates, and validation to reject valid input.

Layout Issues: Invisible characters create unexpected line breaks, cause alignment problems, break table layouts, and create inconsistent spacing that's impossible to see but noticeable in the final output.

Data Corruption: Copying text between systems introduces invisible characters. Excel to database imports, PDF to Word conversions, and web scraping all commonly introduce these hidden problems.

Best Practices for Text Cleaning

Always Keep a Backup

Before cleaning text, save a copy of the original. Some cleaning operations are irreversible, and you might need specific formatting or characters that were removed. Better safe than sorry.

Clean in Stages

Don't apply all cleaning options at once. Start with the most obvious issues (extra spaces, line breaks) and progressively add more aggressive cleaning. This helps identify which operation caused unexpected changes.

Preview Before Committing

Always review cleaned text before using it. Automated cleaning might remove characters or formatting you actually need. Visual inspection catches issues that statistics miss.

Consider Context

Different use cases require different cleaning. Text for databases needs aggressive cleaning; text for human reading needs gentler processing. Match your cleaning strategy to your goal.

Test with Small Samples

When processing large files, test your cleaning settings on a small sample first. This prevents accidentally destroying hours of work with overly aggressive cleaning settings.

Document Your Process

Record which cleaning operations you applied, especially for recurring tasks. This creates a repeatable process and helps troubleshoot issues when they arise.

Cleaning Text from PDF Files

PDF text extraction is notoriously problematic. Text copied from PDFs often contains bizarre spacing, random line breaks, encoding errors, and formatting inconsistencies. Here's how to clean it effectively:

Common PDF Text Problems

Hyphenation Breaks: PDFs break words across lines with hyphens. "exam-ple" needs to become "example" when the line break is removed.
Column Text Flow: Multi-column PDFs copy with text jumping between columns randomly, creating nonsensical sentence order.
Table Formatting: Tables copy with spaces and tabs trying to preserve alignment, creating messy, irregular spacing.
Header/Footer Repetition: Page headers and footers repeat throughout copied text, creating duplicate content that needs removal.
Ligature Characters: Special characters like "fi" and "fl" ligatures sometimes don't copy correctly, creating encoding errors.
Font Encoding Issues: Some PDFs use custom font encoding that produces gibberish when copied to plain text.

Recommended Cleaning Steps for PDF Text

Step 1: Remove extra line breaks to reconnect paragraphs that were split across lines.
Step 2: Fix multiple spaces to clean up table formatting and alignment spacing.
Step 3: Remove duplicate lines to eliminate repeated headers and footers.
Step 4: Fix encoding to correct ligatures and special character problems.
Step 5: Manual review to fix remaining column flow issues and verify paragraph structure.

Stripping HTML Tags and Formatting

When copying content from websites or rich text editors, HTML tags come along for the ride. While browsers hide these tags, they create problems when pasted into plain text applications. Our HTML tag removal feature handles this comprehensively.

What Gets Removed

Structure Tags: <div>, <span>, <p>, <section>, <article>, and all other container elements
Formatting Tags: <b>, <i>, <strong>, <em>, <u>, and all text styling elements
Link Tags: <a href=""> tags are removed, but link text is preserved
Image Tags: <img> tags are removed (images can't exist in plain text)
Script and Style: <script> and <style> tags and their contents are completely removed
Lists: <ul>, <ol>, <li> tags are removed, but list items become paragraphs
Tables: <table>, <tr>, <td> tags are removed; cell content is preserved

What Gets Preserved

All visible text content is preserved. Line breaks from block-level elements are maintained to keep paragraph structure. Special HTML entities like  , ", and & are converted to their plain text equivalents. The result is clean, readable text that maintains the original content without any formatting or markup.

Fixing Common Encoding Problems

Text encoding issues occur when text is transferred between systems with different character encoding schemes. These problems manifest as weird characters, question marks, or garbled symbols where normal text should appear.

Common Encoding Issues and Fixes

Problem Character	Correct Character	Cause
" and "	" (straight quote)	Smart quotes from Word/Google Docs
' and '	' (straight apostrophe)	Smart quotes from rich text editors
—	- (hyphen) or -- (double hyphen)	Em dash from word processors
–	- (hyphen)	En dash from word processors
…	... (three periods)	Ellipsis character from rich text
™, ©, ®	(TM), (C), (R)	Special symbols to plain text

Our text cleaner automatically detects and fixes these common encoding issues, converting special characters to their plain text equivalents. This ensures maximum compatibility across all systems and applications.

Understanding Whitespace Normalization

Whitespace includes spaces, tabs, line breaks, and carriage returns. Different operating systems and applications handle whitespace differently, leading to inconsistencies. Whitespace normalization standardizes these characters for consistent processing.

Types of Whitespace

Space (U+0020): The standard space character you get from the spacebar.
Tab (U+0009): Horizontal tab, often used for indentation but inconsistently rendered.
Line Feed (LF - U+000A): Unix/Mac line ending, single character for new line.
Carriage Return (CR - U+000D): Old Mac line ending, rarely used alone now.
CR+LF: Windows line ending, two characters for new line (carriage return + line feed).
Non-Breaking Space (U+00A0): Looks like a space but prevents line breaks.
Various Unicode Spaces: Em space, en space, thin space, hair space—all look similar but are different characters.

Normalization Benefits

Consistent Line Endings: Convert all line endings to LF (Unix style) for universal compatibility. This prevents issues when moving files between Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

Standardized Spacing: Replace all types of spaces with standard space character. This ensures text displays and processes consistently across all applications and platforms.

Tab Handling: Convert tabs to spaces or remove them entirely. Tabs display differently in different applications, causing alignment issues. Spaces are more predictable.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a text cleaner do?

A text cleaner removes unwanted characters, formatting, and whitespace from text. It can strip HTML tags, remove extra spaces, eliminate line breaks, clean special characters, delete invisible Unicode characters, fix encoding issues, and normalize formatting. Text cleaners are essential for data processing, content migration, and preparing text for analysis.

How do I remove extra spaces from text?

To remove extra spaces from text, paste your content into our text cleaner and select the "Remove Extra Spaces" option. The tool will replace multiple consecutive spaces with a single space, remove spaces at the beginning and end of lines, and clean up tabs and other whitespace characters. The cleaned text is ready to copy instantly.

Can I remove HTML tags from text?

Yes, our text cleaner can strip all HTML tags from your content. This is useful when copying text from websites, cleaning pasted content from word processors, or extracting plain text from HTML documents. The tool removes all tags including <p>, <div>, <span>, <a>, and preserves only the visible text content.

What are invisible characters and why remove them?

Invisible characters are Unicode characters that don't display visibly but exist in text, like zero-width spaces, soft hyphens, and non-breaking spaces. They can cause problems in databases, break searches, create hidden formatting issues, and cause text comparison failures. Removing them ensures clean, consistent text for processing and storage.

How do I clean text copied from PDF files?

Text copied from PDFs often contains extra line breaks, weird spacing, and encoding issues. Use our text cleaner with these options: remove extra line breaks, fix multiple spaces, remove special characters, and normalize whitespace. This will clean up the formatting problems that commonly occur when copying text from PDF documents.

Can I remove duplicate lines from text?

Yes, our text cleaner can identify and remove duplicate lines from your text. This is useful for cleaning lists, removing repeated entries in data files, and eliminating redundant content. You can choose to keep the first occurrence or remove all duplicates entirely based on your needs.

What special characters can be removed?

Our text cleaner can remove various special characters including punctuation marks, symbols, accents, diacritics, currency symbols, mathematical operators, and Unicode special characters. You can choose to remove all special characters or specify which types to keep based on your requirements.

Can I import content from Google Docs?

Yes! You can import text directly from Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides. Click the Google icon button and paste a public link to your document. The document must be set to "Anyone with the link can view" for direct import. For private documents, simply copy the content and use the paste function instead.

Is the text cleaner free to use?

Yes, our text cleaner is completely free with no registration required. You can clean unlimited text with access to all features including HTML tag removal, whitespace cleaning, special character stripping, and duplicate line removal. All processing happens in your browser for complete privacy.

Does the tool work with large text files?

Yes, our text cleaner can handle large text files efficiently. All processing happens in your browser using optimized JavaScript, so there are no file size limits or server upload requirements. Very large files (100MB+) may take a few seconds to process depending on your device speed.

Is my text data secure and private?

Absolutely. All text cleaning happens entirely in your browser using JavaScript. Your text is never sent to our servers, stored, or transmitted anywhere. This ensures complete privacy and security for sensitive documents, personal information, or confidential data.