Text Cleaner

The problem this solves

Text copied out of a PDF, an OCR scan, an email or a web page arrives with the shape of its original still baked into it. Every visual line ends in a line break, words are split with hyphens across those breaks, bullets have become stray characters, replies carry a column of > markers down the left, and justified text has left double spaces everywhere. Paste that into a document and it reflows into nonsense.

Each of the repairs below is mechanical, which is exactly why it should not be done by hand.

Start with where it came from

The four buttons at the top set the fixes for the four situations that account for almost every messy paste:

• From a PDF — line breaks at the end of every visual line, words split with hyphens, stray bullet glyphs.
• From email — quote markers down the left of a reply, wrapped lines, doubled spacing.
• From the web — non-breaking spaces, curly quotes and dashes, but real paragraphs left alone, since a web page rarely wraps text the way a PDF does.
• Everything — every fix on, for text going into code, a CSV or a configuration file.

The individual fixes stay visible underneath, so a preset is a starting point rather than a black box. Change any tick and the preset simply stops being lit — nothing is hidden from you, and nothing resets what you chose.

What each fix does

Lines

• Join wrapped lines — puts a paragraph back together where the line break was only the page running out of room. A break is treated as a wrap when the line stopped without finishing a sentence and either ran the width of the page or is continued by a lower-case word. That last test is what stops a list of short names being swept into one line.
• Rejoin split words — turns hyphen- at the end of one line and ated at the start of the next back into hyphenated. Applied before line joining, since it is the more specific case.
• Tidy bullets — •, ●, ▪, ·, ‣ and ◦ at the start of a line become a plain -, which most editors then recognise as a list.
• Drop quote marks — removes the > and | markers email adds down the left of a quoted reply, including the doubled ones on a reply to a reply.

Spaces

• Collapse double spaces — runs of spaces and tabs inside a line become one. Common in text lifted from justified columns.
• Trim line ends — removes the whitespace hanging off the end of every line. It runs before the previous fix, so a trailing run is reported once rather than twice.
• Close up gaps — three or more blank lines in a row become one.
• Strip invisible characters — removes zero-width spaces, soft hyphens, word joiners and byte-order marks, and turns non-breaking and other fixed-width spaces into ordinary ones. These are the characters that make two identical-looking strings refuse to match.

Symbols — Straight quotes converts typographic quotes and apostrophes to straight ones, and Plain dashes turns an em dash into -- and an en dash into -. Both are off unless the destination is code, a CSV or configuration, because in prose you usually want to keep the typographic ones.

It tells you what it did

Under the two boxes is a row of tags — 12 wrapped lines joined, 3 split words rejoined, 1 invisible character removed — one for each fix that actually fired, with a count. A cleaner that silently hands back different text is asking to be trusted; this is the receipt, and it is often the fastest way to discover that a paste contained something you could not see.

A good order of work

1. Pick where the text came from and paste it in.
2. Read the first two paragraphs of the result. If real paragraph breaks have been swallowed, switch off Join wrapped lines and fix the few that need it by hand.
3. Only then turn on the symbol fixes, and only if the destination is code or data.

Common questions

Is my text uploaded?

No. Every transformation runs in your browser on this page.

Will it fix OCR mistakes?

No — it fixes layout artefacts, not recognition errors. A misread word is still a real word, so nothing can flag it automatically. There is more on this in OCR, explained without the jargon.

Can I get the original back?

Yes. The input box is untouched; the cleaned version appears beside it, so you can always compare or start again. If you want to see exactly what changed, paste both into the Text Comparison tool.

Are my settings remembered?

Yes, in this browser only, and only the tick boxes — never the text.