Text / Clean up
Text Cleaner: Fix Smart Quotes, Spaces, and Invisible Characters
Clean text pasted from Word, web pages, or PDFs: turn smart quotes into straight ones, collapse repeated spaces and empty lines, remove zero-width and other invisible characters, and convert full-width letters, choosing each fix yourself.
Text Cleaner: Fix Smart Quotes, Spaces, and Invisible Characters: Each option fixes one kind of mess: curly quotes and apostrophes become ' and ", non-breaking and other special spaces become normal spaces, zero-width spaces, joiners, soft hyphens, and direction marks are removed, runs of spaces become one, and more than one empty line in a row is cut down. A summary lists how many characters each fix changed. Runs 100% locally in your browser with zero server file uploads.
- Category
- Text tools
- Runs
- In your browser
- Cost
- Free · no sign-up
- Availability
- Ready to use
Runs entirely in your browser
Clean text
"Smart quotes" — and extra spaces, non-breaking spaces… and full-width ＡＢＣ １２３.
Changed: invisible characters 1, special spaces 2, quotes 2, space runs 1, empty lines 1
Text pasted from word processors, web pages, and PDFs often carries curly quotes, non-breaking spaces, zero-width characters, and stray tabs that break code, spreadsheets, and search. Tick what to fix; your choices are remembered in this browser, and the text never leaves it.
What each option catches
Smart quotes: ‘ ’ “ ” and similar marks, plus the prime and acute accent often used as apostrophes. Special spaces: the non-breaking space (U+00A0), narrow and figure spaces, and the full-width ideographic space. Invisible characters: zero-width space, joiner and non-joiner, word joiner, byte-order mark, soft hyphen, and bidirectional control marks.
To see exactly which invisible characters a text holds and where, use the invisible character detector.
Order of the fixes
Line endings are normalised first, then invisible characters and special spaces are handled, so a non-breaking space between two spaces collapses into a single space. Lines are trimmed and empty lines collapsed last.
How to use it
- Paste the text.
- Tick the clean-ups you want; your choices are remembered.
- Copy the clean text and see what was changed.
Privacy & limitations
The text is cleaned in your browser and never uploaded.
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Frequently asked questions
Why does pasted text break my code or spreadsheet?
Word processors replace straight quotes with curly ones and may insert non-breaking or zero-width spaces. They look the same but are different characters, so code, formulas, and searches fail to match them.
Will it change dashes?
Only if you tick that option: en and em dashes are often wanted in prose, so they are kept by default.
Does it handle Windows line endings?
Yes: CR LF and lone CR line endings become plain LF.
Free tool · runs in your browser · no account required