Text Cleaner
Strip the invisible characters and smart punctuation that word processors leave behind, and see exactly what was removed.
About this tool
Cleans text that has come through a word processor, a PDF or a rich text editor, and reports every change it made.
That baggage is invisible and it breaks things later. **Non-breaking spaces** stop a line wrapping where it should. **Soft hyphens** appear mid-word the moment the line breaks somewhere else. **Zero-width spaces** make a string fail to match itself, which is why a search finds nothing and a slug comes out wrong. **Curly quotes** are correct in prose and wrong in code, URLs and configuration, where they break things with an error that never mentions them.
**Every change is counted and shown.** A cleaner that quietly alters text is one nobody can trust with anything that matters, so nothing here happens silently.
Each transformation is separately switchable, because the right answer differs: curly quotes belong in an article and not in a code sample.
Common questions
Why does my pasted text contain invisible characters?
Word processors and PDFs use them for formatting — soft hyphens for line breaking, non-breaking spaces to keep phrases together. Copying carries them along into places where they mean nothing and break things.
Should I always replace curly quotes?
No. In prose they are typographically correct. In code, URLs, command lines and configuration files they are wrong and produce errors that do not mention them. That is why it is a separate option.
Why are double spaces after a full stop worth removing?
They come from typewriters, where every character was the same width. Proportional fonts space sentences correctly on their own, and HTML collapses the second space anyway — so it survives in your source and nowhere else.
Is anything lost?
Only what you switch on. Every category is counted and reported, so you can see what was removed before using the result.