About the Text Cleaner
Text that has been through a word processor carries baggage. Curly quotes and en dashes break a code snippet or a CSV import. Non-breaking spaces look identical to ordinary spaces but do not match a search. Zero-width joiners, bidirectional overrides and byte order marks are invisible yet still count as characters, and they are a favourite trick for smuggling hidden content into a paste.
Each cleaning pass is a separate switch so you can see exactly what changed. Straightening converts curly quotes, primes, all four dash variants, the ellipsis, bullets and non-breaking spaces to their plain ASCII equivalents. The invisible pass removes the U+200B to U+200F range, the directional overrides, the word joiner block and the byte order mark. Control codes below a space, other than the newline and tab you actually want, are dropped as well.
Whitespace tidying collapses runs of spaces and tabs, trims both ends of every line and reduces three or more blank lines to one gap, which is enough to turn a PDF paste into something readable. Two passes are off by default because they are destructive: stripping HTML tags, and forcing plain ASCII, which decomposes accented letters into their base form so café becomes cafe. The status shows the character count before and after. For whitespace alone, Remove Extra Spaces is more focused, and Remove Accents handles only the diacritics.
How to use
- Paste the text you copied from a document, PDF or web page.
- Leave the default passes on, or untick any you want to keep.
- Tick Strip HTML tags or Force plain ASCII for a harsher clean.
- Copy the cleaned text; the status shows how many characters were removed.
Common questions
- What counts as an invisible character?
- Zero-width spaces and joiners, left-to-right and right-to-left marks and overrides, the word joiner range and the byte order mark. All are removed when that box is ticked.
- Will it change my accented letters?
- Only if you tick "Force plain ASCII". Otherwise é, ü and ñ pass through untouched.
- Does it keep paragraph breaks?
- Yes. A single blank line between paragraphs is kept; only three or more consecutive blank lines are reduced.
- Why did my em dash become a hyphen?
- The straightening pass maps en dashes, em dashes, horizontal bars and minus signs to a plain hyphen so the text is safe in code and CSV. Untick it to keep the typography.