Whitespace and Line Break Cleaner

How to use it

1. 1Paste your text into the box marked "Your text"Paste text that has come from a PDF, a web page, an email or anywhere else that leaves a mess behind. Everything happens inside your browser — nothing is uploaded, so there is nothing for us to store, log or lose.
2. 2Read the result as it updatesThere is no button to press. Turn on the cleanups you want and the result updates immediately. The output recomputes every time you change the text or one of the options above it.
3. 3Start with invisible charactersZero-width spaces and byte-order marks are the ones that cause inexplicable bugs — a string comparison fails, a search finds nothing, and nothing looks wrong on screen because they are invisible by definition.
4. 4Normalise unusual spacesNon-breaking spaces and other exotic space characters come in from word processors and look identical to ordinary spaces. They are not, and anything splitting on whitespace will disagree with your eyes.
5. 5Choose your line endings deliberatelyWindows uses CRLF and everything else uses LF. Mixed endings in one file are what turn a one-line change into a diff that touches every line.
6. 6Use trimming and collapsing lastTrim each line, trim the whole text and collapse repeated spaces are independent. Read the notes: they say exactly what was changed and how much of it, so a cleanup is never silent.
7. 7Copy or download the resultThe buttons under the output put it on your clipboard or save it as a file, and each one says exactly what it will copy or download. Any note about something the tool changed or deliberately left alone is shown with the result rather than hidden.

About this tool

Finds and removes the whitespace problems that come with text copied out of a PDF, a spreadsheet, a word processor or a web page: trailing spaces, runs of blank lines, tabs, mixed line endings, and characters that are genuinely invisible.

The panel showing what your text *contains* is half the tool. "Why do these two strings not match when they look identical?" is usually answered by "one of them has four non-breaking spaces in it", and seeing that is more useful than cleaning it.

Understanding the result

A non-breaking space looks exactly like an ordinary space and is a different character. It will not match a search, will not split a word, and will not compare equal — which is why it breaks imports and lookups so often.

Zero-width spaces, byte-order marks and soft hyphens are invisible and inert. They are removed, and the count of each is reported, because a tool that deletes characters you cannot see must say what it deleted.

Line endings are normalised before anything else and restored at the end. Trimming CRLF text without doing that leaves an invisible carriage return at the end of every line.

Example

Roftr[non-breaking space]Clouds[zero-width space]␣␣␣

Roftr Clouds
▲ 1 × non-breaking space · 1 × zero-width space · 1 line with trailing whitespace

Limitations

• Zero-width joiners and non-joiners are never removed. They are invisible but not meaningless: they control letter joining in Tamil, Devanagari, Persian and Arabic, and they are what holds a multi-part emoji together. Removing them changes the text. The same applies to the marks that lay out Arabic and Hebrew.
• Collapsing repeated spaces will flatten deliberate alignment — in an ASCII table or in code. Keep indentation, or leave the option off, when that matters.
• Converting spaces to tabs applies to indentation only. Spaces used to align text inside a line are left alone, because converting those breaks the alignment.
• This works on whitespace and invisible characters. It will not fix encoding damage, where the bytes were already misread and the characters are visibly wrong.

Questions