About the Trim Lines
Whitespace at the ends of a line is invisible and expensive. A trailing space on a licence key makes it invalid, a padded value fails a lookup that would otherwise match, and two files that look identical produce a diff full of phantom changes. This tool trims both ends of every line and changes nothing else: the spacing inside each line and the breaks between lines stay exactly as they are.
Trimming follows the full Unicode whitespace definition, so tabs, non-breaking spaces, narrow no-break spaces and the ideographic space are stripped from the ends along with ordinary spaces. Carriage returns from Windows line endings go too, which helps when a file has travelled between operating systems and left a stray \r hanging off each line. Zero-width characters are formatting marks rather than whitespace, so those stay and need a different fix.
A line made entirely of spaces becomes empty but is still a line, so the shape of a list is unchanged; follow with Remove Empty Lines when you want it gone. This is the safe first step before a comparison in the Diff Checker, and Remove Extra Spaces is the stronger version that also squeezes the runs inside each line.
How to use
- Paste the text.
- Copy the trimmed result.
- Internal spacing and line breaks are preserved.
Common questions
- Does it change spacing inside a line?
- No. Only the start and end of each line are trimmed.
- Are blank lines removed?
- A line of only spaces becomes empty but is kept. Use Remove Empty Lines to drop it.
- Does it remove tabs?
- Leading and trailing tabs are trimmed along with spaces.