Text Cleaner

The Text Cleaner tidies messy text in one pass: it collapses runs of spaces and tabs, trims every line, reduces stacks of blank lines to a single blank line, and removes whitespace at the very start and end. Paragraphs stay separated, so the result is ready to paste into an email, a form, a document or a CMS.

The four fixes, in order

1. Spaces and tabs: any run of spaces and tab characters becomes one space.
2. Line edges: the space at the beginning and end of each line is removed, which also removes indentation.
3. Blank lines: three or more line breaks in a row become exactly two, leaving one empty line between paragraphs. Lines that held only spaces count as empty once step 2 has run.
4. Whole text: leading and trailing blank lines and spaces are trimmed.

Before and after: a leave application

Dear  Sir,



   I am   writing to    request leave
		for two days.



Regards,
  Asha

After Clean text:

Dear Sir,

I am writing to request leave
for two days.

Regards,
Asha

The three blank lines became one, the tab-indented line lost its tabs, and the double spaces inside sentences are gone. Single line breaks, like the one between "leave" and "for two days", are left in place.

What the cleaner does not change

• Non-breaking spaces (U+00A0), common in text copied from websites and Word, are not treated as spaces and stay as they are.
• Single line breaks are kept, so text copied from a PDF with a hard return at the end of every line still has those returns. Use Remove Line Breaks to join them into a paragraph.
• Punctuation spacing such as "word ," or missing spaces after full stops is not corrected.
• Curly quotes, dashes, duplicate lines and letter case are untouched.
• Indentation is lost, so do not run code, YAML or indented outlines through it.

Typical sources of messy text

• Emails and forwarded messages: quoted replies and signatures pile up blank lines and indentation.
• Web pages: copying an article often brings long gaps between paragraphs and stray tabs from the page layout.
• Lecture slides and scanned notes: pasted text arrives with irregular spacing that makes it hard to reread or print.
• Phone-typed form entries: addresses and comments often contain double spaces and trailing spaces that break matching in a spreadsheet.

Choosing between the whitespace tools

The cleaner is the best default for prose. Reach for Remove Empty Lines when you want a list with no gaps at all. A cleaned text also gives more accurate results in a word or character counter, since stray whitespace no longer inflates the character count.