How to use the Text Cleaner
- Paste your text into the left box.
- Pick a preset (such as Fix pasted text or Tidy a list) or switch individual steps on and off.
- Check the before-and-after counts, or press Preview changes to see every edit highlighted.
- Copy or download the cleaned text.
What does this tool do?
Each cleaning step does one job and nothing else, and the steps always run in the order shown: line endings, spaces and characters first, then letter case, then line-level steps such as removing blank lines, removing duplicates and sorting. That makes the result predictable — switch a step off and you see exactly what it was doing.
The character steps handle the problems copy-and-paste usually brings: zero-width spaces and soft hyphens you can't see, non-breaking spaces, curly quotes and long dashes, tabs, HTML tags and entities, and Windows or old-Mac line breaks. Punctuation can be removed while keeping apostrophes inside words, and you can list any other characters to strip.
Why use it?
- Fifteen independent steps, with presets for common jobs.
- Before-and-after character, word and line counts.
- Highlighted preview of every change.
- Runs in your browser; your text is never uploaded.
Example
With the “Fix pasted text” preset, text copied from a PDF such as “ The results were clear. ” followed by three blank lines becomes “The results were clear.” with a single paragraph break — the hidden zero-width space removed and the spacing normalised.
Common mistakes
- Turning on “Remove blank lines” when you want to keep paragraphs — use “Squeeze blank lines to one” instead.
- Removing punctuation from text that contains numbers like 3.5 or 1,000 — the decimal point and comma are punctuation too.
Privacy
Everything you type is processed in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent to our servers or stored by us. There's no account to create and nothing to install.
Frequently asked questions
Can it change upper and lower case too?
Yes — switch on “Change letter case” and choose sentence case, lowercase, UPPERCASE, Title Case or Capitalize Each Word. For case changes alone, the Case Converter is quicker.
Which characters count as punctuation?
Unicode punctuation: full stops, commas, question and exclamation marks, colons, semicolons, quotes, brackets, hyphens and dashes. Symbols such as $, +, =, < and > are kept; add them to “Remove specific characters” if you want them gone.
Does it keep my line breaks?
Yes, unless you turn on a step that changes lines. Line endings are converted to standard LF only when “Normalize line endings” is on.
Will it change my words or spelling?
Not unless you switch on a step that does — such as changing letter case or removing punctuation. The default “Fix pasted text” preset only fixes line endings, spacing, invisible characters and runs of blank lines.
Last reviewed by the M2Toolkit team.