Text Cleaner
Clean up text with togglable options: trim whitespace, collapse spaces, remove line breaks, strip special characters, and normalize smart quotes.
Result:
How to use the Text Cleaner
Paste your text into the box, tick the cleanup options you need, and click "Clean Text". Each option can be toggled independently, so you can mix and match exactly the cleanup steps your text needs.
Cleanup options explained
- Trim leading/trailing whitespace: Removes stray spaces from the start and end of the text and each line.
- Collapse multiple spaces: Turns two or more spaces in a row into a single space.
- Remove line breaks: Joins multi-line text into a single paragraph, replacing line breaks with spaces.
- Remove special characters: Strips everything except letters, numbers, spaces, and basic punctuation.
- Normalize smart quotes: Converts curly "smart" quotes and apostrophes (often introduced by Word or iOS) into plain straight quotes.
Example
Text copied from a Word document with curly quotes, double spaces, and trailing whitespace on each line is cleaned into plain, single-spaced text with straight quotes — ready to paste into code, a CMS, or a plain-text file.
Common Use Cases
- Cleaning text copied from Word or Google Docs before pasting into code or a database.
- Normalizing smart quotes so text displays correctly in plain-text environments.
- Stripping stray formatting characters from scraped or exported content.
FAQs
Can I use only some of the cleanup options?
Yes — every checkbox is independent. Untick anything you don't want applied and only the checked options run when you click "Clean Text".
What counts as a "special character"?
With that option enabled, anything that isn't a letter, number, space, or basic punctuation (period, comma, exclamation mark, question mark, quotes, parentheses, hyphen) is removed.
Why would I normalize smart quotes?
Word processors and phone keyboards often auto-replace straight quotes with curly "smart" quotes, which can break code syntax, CSV files, or systems that expect plain ASCII quotation marks.