Text Cleaner
Frequently asked questions
Where does the extra formatting in text come from?
There are three sources. Word and Google Docs – when you paste into an HTML field, invisible formatting tags come with it, so the text looks right but carries hidden rubbish in the markup. PDF – a line break inside the document often turns into a hard paragraph break when copied, which makes the text fall apart into short lines. Another website – the HTML tags for links, emphasis and styles of the source page are copied along with the text.
Why clean text before publishing?
Hidden markup makes the page heavier and can clash with the site styles, so the text ends up looking different from what was intended. Double spaces and stray line breaks give away careless copy-paste during a manual review, and they get in the way of tools such as the word density counter and the word counter – formatting characters distort the final figures.
How is a non-breaking space different from a normal one?
A non-breaking space stops the browser from wrapping the line at that point, and it is often copied out of Word without you noticing. It looks exactly like an ordinary space, but it can behave differently in search and in character counts.
Can I remove only double spaces and leave the normal ones?
Yes, that is what the "Repeated" mode is for – it collapses several consecutive spaces into one without touching the normal gaps between words.
Will removing HTML tags also delete the text inside them?
No, only the markup itself is removed – the angle brackets and the tag attributes. The visible text those tags were formatting stays where it was.
Is the tool suitable for cleaning code rather than plain text?
It is built for text content, not for program code: indentation and line breaks in code often carry meaning, and collapsing them can break the structure.
Paste text copied from Word, a PDF or another website, choose what to strip out – HTML tags, extra spaces, line breaks – and press "Remove". The formatting of the source is taken off in a single step.
How to clean up text
- Paste the text into the "Content" field. Copy the fragment together with its formatting – there is no need to clean anything by hand beforehand.
- Set the three switches. For text out of Word it is usually enough to collapse repeated spaces; for text copied from a web page, strip the HTML tags as well.
- Press "Remove". The result appears right below the form – all that is left is to copy it where you need it.
What can be cleaned
The tool has three independent switches and they can be combined in any way.
| Switch | Modes | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| HTML tags | All / None | Completely remove the markup that came along with text copied from a web page, or leave it untouched |
| Spaces | All / None / Repeated | Strip spaces entirely, leave them as they are, or collapse double and triple spaces into one while keeping normal gaps between words |
| Line breaks | All / None / Repeated | The same three modes for line breaks – useful for text out of a PDF, where nearly every line of the document turns into a separate paragraph |
What to do with the cleaned text
Once the text is clean it is convenient to check its length straight away with the word counter, bring a heading to the right form with the case converter, or compare the result with the previous version using the diff checker.