Free Text Cleaner
A text cleaner removes the clutter that comes with copied text. Paste your text, tick the clean-up steps you need, such as stripping HTML tags, collapsing extra spaces, removing blank lines or line breaks, deleting hidden characters and replacing curly quotes and dashes, and this free tool returns the tidy version with a count of what changed.
Text Cleaner
Text and Content
About this tool
Text copied from web pages, PDFs, emails and word processors often carries things you cannot see: leftover HTML tags, non-breaking spaces, double spaces, tabs, hard line breaks in the middle of sentences, zero-width characters and curly quotes that break code or spreadsheets. Each step in this tool fixes one of those problems, and you can combine them. The defaults are the ones most people want for a quick clean-up.
Stripping HTML removes tags such as p, div and span, drops the contents of script and style blocks, and turns entities like & and back into normal characters. "Join lines into one paragraph" turns text with hard line breaks, as copied from a PDF, into continuous text, while "remove blank lines" only deletes empty lines and keeps the line structure. The hidden character step removes control characters and zero-width spaces that cause odd behaviour in forms and search.
The smart punctuation step replaces curly single and double quotes with straight ones, and long dashes and the ellipsis character with plain hyphens and three dots. This is useful for code, CSV files and systems that only accept plain ASCII. Leave it unticked when you are editing normal prose, where typographic quotes are correct. Your text is processed on the request and is not stored.
Frequently asked questions
How do I remove HTML tags from text?
Paste the HTML or the copied text, tick "Strip HTML tags" and clean. Tags are removed, the contents of script and style blocks are dropped, and entities such as & become normal characters. The visible text is left in place, with line breaks kept where block elements such as paragraphs ended.
How do I fix text copied from a PDF with broken lines?
Tick "Join lines into one paragraph". Every line break inside a paragraph is replaced by a space, and a blank line is kept between paragraphs. Also tick the extra spaces step to tidy gaps. Hyphenated words that were split across lines may need a quick manual check.
What are non-printable characters?
They are invisible characters such as control codes, zero-width spaces and byte order marks. They come from copying between apps and can break form validation, search and code. The hidden character step removes them while keeping normal spaces, tabs and line breaks.
Why replace smart quotes?
Curly quotes and long dashes look right in prose but cause trouble in code, CSV files, URLs and some databases that expect plain ASCII quotes. Replacing them with straight quotes and hyphens avoids those errors. Skip the step when you are editing normal text for readers.
Does the tool change my words?
No. It only removes tags, spaces, line breaks and invisible characters, or swaps punctuation marks for plain ones. It never rewrites, corrects or reorders words. The summary tells you how many characters were removed so you can check the effect.