Toolsy

Text cleaner

Strip the invisible junk that comes along when you copy text out of Word, Docs, a PDF or an email.

Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you paste is uploaded or stored.

Paste anything copied from Word, Docs, a PDF or an email
What to fix

Zero-width spaces and joiners that survive a copy from Docs, Notion or a PDF. They break search and word counts without ever showing up.

Word and many CMS editors insert these silently. They look like spaces and behave like glue.

Straightens curly quotes and apostrophes and turns em and en dashes into plain hyphens. Use it when the text is going into code, a CSV or an ad platform.

Collapses runs of spaces and tabs into one. Leaves line breaks alone.

Spaces sitting at the end of a line. In Markdown two of them silently become a line break.

Joins lines that were broken mid-sentence — the classic result of copying out of a PDF or an email. Paragraph breaks are kept.

Reduces three or more blank lines to a single paragraph break.

Removes the •, ‣ and · that come along when list formatting is lost.

Cleaned
The cleaned text appears here.

What this tool does

It removes the characters you cannot see and normalises the ones you can, in the order that does the least damage. Each fix is separate and reversible: switch one off, and the result updates instantly.

The default set is deliberately conservative — invisible characters, non-breaking spaces, doubled spaces, trailing spaces and stacked blank lines. These are the fixes nobody ever regrets. The two that change how the text reads, straightening curly quotes and rejoining wrapped lines, start switched off.

When each one earns its keep

Before pasting into a CMS. Non-breaking spaces from Word survive the trip and turn into   in the published HTML, where they refuse to wrap and produce strange gaps on mobile.

Before importing a CSV. A single zero-width character inside a column value is enough to break an exact match, and it will not show up in any preview.

After copying out of a PDF. Hard-wrapped lines are the giveaway. Every line ends where the PDF column ended, which turns into a mess the moment the text lands in a narrower container.

Before an ad platform. Curly quotes and em dashes sometimes count differently or get rejected outright. Straighten them for the ad, keep them for the article.

Questions

What are invisible characters and why do they matter?

Zero-width spaces, joiners and soft hyphens are real characters with no visible width. They come from documents, PDFs and web pages, and they break things quietly — a search that finds nothing, a CSV column that will not match, an ad that gets rejected for a character count you cannot see.

Why do line breaks appear in the middle of my sentences?

Text copied from a PDF or a plain-text email carries the line wrapping of the original layout as real line breaks. On screen it looks like a ragged column. The "hard-wrapped lines" option joins those lines back into sentences while leaving paragraph breaks alone.

Should I straighten curly quotes?

Only when the text is heading somewhere that treats them as different characters — code, a CSV import, a URL, or an ad platform that counts them oddly. For anything a person will read, curly quotes are correct typography and worth keeping.

Can I see what was changed?

Yes. Each fix reports how many times it matched, so you can tell the difference between text that was already clean and a fix that did nothing because it was switched off.

Is the text uploaded anywhere?

No. Every replacement happens in your browser, and nothing is sent, logged or stored.

TextWord and character counterCount words and characters, score how hard the text is to read, and see which phrases you lean on.MarketingUTM builderBuild clean campaign links one at a time — or paste a whole list and tag every URL at once.

Last updated 19 Aug 2026