Text Tools

Clean up text pasted from anywhere

Text pasted out of a PDF, a word processor or a website carries things you cannot see: zero-width spaces, non-breaking spaces, curly quotes and ragged indentation. This removes them, one switch at a time.

Clean up

Turns “ ” ‘ ’ — … into plain equivalents, and a non-breaking space into a real one.

Zero-width spaces and direction marks, which arrive from word processors and break search.

Cleaned

Paste text above and the cleaned version appears here.

  • Runs in your browser
  • No account required
  • Free to use

How it works

01

The invisible characters are the ones that cause trouble

Zero-width spaces, joiners and direction marks arrive invisibly and then break things quietly — search does not match, comparisons fail, and two identical-looking lines refuse to deduplicate. They are removed first, before anything else, because a zero-width space sitting between two words stops the space-collapsing step from seeing them as adjacent.

02

Curly quotes and non-breaking spaces

A word processor silently converts straight quotes to curly ones and some spaces to non-breaking ones. In prose that is fine; in code, a CSV or an SMS it is a bug — a curly apostrophe in a text message drops the character limit from 160 to 70. Both are converted back to their plain equivalents.

03

The order matters

Invisibles are removed, then punctuation is normalised, then spaces collapse, then lines are trimmed. Running those in a different order leaves work behind — trimming before collapsing means a line reduced to a single space never becomes empty.

What it does

Seven switches, sensible defaults

The five that are almost always wanted after a paste are on; the two destructive ones — stripping numbers and punctuation — are off, because they are occasionally exactly right and usually a surprise.

Paragraphs preserved

Repeated spaces collapse without flattening your text into one line, and blank-line runs collapse to a single paragraph break rather than disappearing.

A count of what went

How many characters were removed, so you can tell whether the invisible ones were really there.

Nothing uploaded

It runs in your browser, which matters given this is usually the step before pasting text somewhere that counts.

Practical advice

Getting a better result

  • If a search that should match is failing, run the text through with only “remove invisible characters” on — that is the usual culprit.
  • Turn off smart punctuation replacement if you are cleaning prose for publication, where curly quotes are correct.
  • To flatten everything to a single line instead, use remove extra spaces — this tool deliberately keeps your paragraph breaks.

Questions

Things people ask

What counts as an invisible character?

Zero-width spaces, zero-width joiners and non-joiners, the byte order mark, and the bidirectional formatting marks. They render as nothing and are frequently introduced by word processors, PDF exports and website copy.

Will it change my line breaks?

Only runs of three or more, which collapse to a single blank line, and only if that switch is on. Ordinary paragraph breaks are preserved.

Why did my apostrophes change?

Smart punctuation replacement is on by default, turning curly quotes into straight ones. That is what you want for code, CSVs and SMS; turn it off for prose headed for publication.

Who builds these

Free tools by day. Websites that earn their keep by trade.

KuConvert is built by KUDUY, a web design and development agency. From custom WordPress builds to SEO and e-commerce, everything they do is engineered to bring you more qualified traffic and turn it into revenue.

  • Fixed scope, no surprise invoices

    Most sites ship in four to eight weeks with the scope and the price agreed up front.

  • SEO from day one

    Search is designed into the build — structure, schema and Core Web Vitals — not retrofitted.

  • A team, not a ticket queue

    A project manager, a designer and a developer you can actually reach.

Need your whole site to load this fast?

Images are usually the heaviest thing on a page and the easiest win. KUDUY works on site speed, image delivery and Core Web Vitals for teams who would rather not do it by hand.

This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your files are never uploaded.