About the Remove Extra Spaces
Values pasted out of a spreadsheet, a fixed-width report or an aligned table arrive padded: two spaces after a full stop, a run of tabs standing in for a column gap, a trailing space nobody can see. This tool collapses any run of spaces and tabs inside a line down to one space and trims both ends of that line, while leaving the line breaks alone so rows stay rows.
Working line by line is the whole point, since merging everything into a single paragraph is a different job with a different tool. Windows CRLF endings are split correctly, so a file from Notepad behaves like one written on Linux.
The one character it does not touch is the non-breaking space. Text copied from a web page or a word processor is full of U+00A0, which looks identical to an ordinary space but is not matched here, so a stubborn gap that survives cleaning is almost always an NBSP. Swap it out with Find and Replace, or reach for Remove All Whitespace when the result is meant to contain no spaces at all. To join the lines together instead, use Remove Line Breaks.
How to use
- Paste the text.
- Copy the cleaned result.
- Line breaks are preserved.
Common questions
- Does it remove line breaks?
- No. Only spaces and tabs within lines are collapsed; line breaks stay so paragraphs remain separate.
- Are tabs converted to spaces?
- Runs of spaces and tabs together become a single space. To convert tabs to a set number of spaces, use Tabs to Spaces.
- Is trailing space removed?
- Yes, each line is trimmed at both ends.