Text Cleaner

The four options always run in the same order, and that order explains the surprises

Whatever you tick, this tool does the same four things in the same sequence: trim each line, then collapse spaces, then drop empty lines, then optionally join everything into one line. You cannot reorder them, and almost every confusing result comes from that fixed order rather than from a bug.

The clearest case is the one people hit first. Remove empty lines does not remove a line made of spaces, unless you also tick Trim each line. Measured here, with text that is a, then a line of three spaces, then b:

• Remove empty lines on its own: the blank-looking line survives, because it is three characters long and the filter only drops lines of length zero.
• Remove empty lines plus Trim each line: the middle line is trimmed to nothing first, so the filter then drops it.

So if a document still has gaps after cleaning, tick Trim as well. Pasted text from a word processor or a web page is full of lines that look empty and are not.

Collapse spaces flattens your indentation, and it will not fix a pasted non-breaking space

Collapse spaces replaces runs of ordinary spaces and tabs with one space. It does not know the difference between the gap in the middle of a sentence and the indentation at the start of a line, so it removes both. Measured: two lines of code indented with four spaces come back indented with one.

If you are tidying code, leave this option off. A tab also becomes a single space, so indentation that was tabs will not survive either.

The reverse problem is more common and harder to see. A non-breaking space is not collapsed at all. Measured: three non-breaking spaces between a and b come back as three non-breaking spaces, while three ordinary spaces in the same position come back as one. That matters because a non-breaking space is what word processors and web pages insert to stop a line wrapping, so it is exactly the kind of invisible mess you pasted here to remove.

There is an asymmetry worth knowing, and we measured both halves of it. Trim does remove a non-breaking space, because JavaScript’s trim uses the language’s own definition of whitespace, which includes it. Collapse does not, because it matches only the literal space and tab. So a stray non-breaking space at the start of a line is fixable here and the same character in the middle of a line is not.

Join into one line ignores the other options and always collapses the gaps

Join is not a fifth step applied to the result of the first four. It replaces the output entirely: it takes the lines, puts a single space between them, squeezes any runs of spaces, and trims the ends. Measured, with Join as the only option ticked:

• a   b on one line and c on the next comes back as a b c, so the three spaces were collapsed even though Collapse spaces was unticked.
• Text with a blank line between a and b comes back as a b whether Remove empty lines is ticked or not, because the blank line contributes nothing but the spaces around it get squeezed anyway.

So Join is a shortcut for “give me this as one tidy paragraph”, and if you need a different separator, or you want to keep your double spaces, do it somewhere else.

Line endings are already normalised before this tool sees your text

If you pasted a Windows file hoping to convert its line endings, that conversion has already happened and this tool had nothing to do with it. The HTML standard says a textarea’s API value is “the element’s raw value, with newlines normalized”, and that it is “normalized so that line breaks use U+000A LINE FEED (LF) characters”.

We checked what the box actually hands over: a carriage return, a carriage return plus line feed, and a plain line feed all arrive as the same single character. That happens in the browser before any code on this page runs, so no web page can show you or change your original line endings. For that you need a local editor or a command-line tool.

What this tool deliberately does not do

It is a line tidier, not a text sanitiser. Everything in this list was measured as surviving a pass with every option ticked:

• Zero-width characters. A zero-width space between two letters passes straight through, still invisible, still breaking your searches and your word counts.
• Smart quotes and dashes. Curly quotes, apostrophes and long dashes are left exactly as they are. Nothing here converts them to the plain ASCII versions.
• Non-breaking and other exotic spaces in the middle of a line, as described above. Unicode defines well over a dozen space characters; this tool handles two of them.
• Duplicate lines. Two identical lines both survive. For that, use Sort Lines, which has a Unique option.
• Case. Nothing is upper-cased or lower-cased. Use Case Converter.
• Tabs between columns. With Collapse on, every tab becomes one space, so pasted tabular data loses its columns. With Collapse off, tabs survive untouched.
• Undo. The box is the only copy of what you typed. Keep the original somewhere if it matters.

Nothing is uploaded. The whole tool is a few lines of JavaScript running in your browser, and your text never leaves your device.

Sources

• A textarea’s API value and newline normalisation: HTML Standard, the textarea element. html.spec.whatwg.org
• Normalising newlines to LF: WHATWG Infra Standard. infra.spec.whatwg.org
• What counts as whitespace for trim, which is why it removes a non-breaking space: ECMAScript, White Space. tc39.es/ecma262
• The behaviour of trim itself. developer.mozilla.org
• Why a literal space-and-tab pattern matches less than \s does: regular expression character classes. developer.mozilla.org
• The full set of Unicode space and separator characters, including the zero-width space: General Punctuation chart. unicode.org/charts

Every behaviour described on this page was measured against this tool as it is published, in a browser, on 14 October 2026. Where the page says what the tool does not do, that is a statement about this tool, not about text cleaning in general.