Text Cleaner

How to use Text Cleaner

1. Paste text into Input text, drop a text file onto it, or use Open file. Try an example loads a messy sample.
2. Tick the cleaning steps you want. Trim lines, Remove empty lines and Remove duplicate lines are on to start with.
3. Adjust a step’s options next to it, such as Keep first or Keep last for duplicates, or the Order for Sort lines, and use the arrows to change the order steps run in.
4. Check Lines before, Lines after and Characters below the result, then copy or download the Cleaned text, or open it in another tool with Send to….

How it works

The text is split into lines at LF, CRLF or a lone CR, and each ticked step runs on the lines in the order shown, top to bottom. Trim lines removes whitespace from either or both ends, including non-breaking spaces. Collapse inner whitespace turns runs of two or more spaces, tabs or non-breaking spaces into one space but keeps leading indentation. Remove empty lines also removes lines that contain only whitespace. Remove duplicate lines compares whole lines, optionally ignoring case, and keeps the first or last copy in its place.

Sort lines sorts A → Z or Z → A with the browser’s English collation, which can ignore case; Natural (numbers by value) puts item2 before item10; By length counts characters; and Random shuffles with a seeded generator so the order stays put while you edit, until you click Shuffle again. Convert tabs ↔ spaces expands tabs to the next tab stop, or turns leading spaces into tabs. Strip non-printable and zero-width characters removes control characters (keeping tabs and line breaks), soft hyphens, zero-width spaces and joiners, direction marks and bidi controls, and byte order marks.

The original line endings and any final newline are kept, unless Normalise line endings converts them to LF or CRLF. Everything runs in your browser as you type.

Limits

• Strip non-printable and zero-width characters also removes the zero-width joiner, which breaks joined emoji such as family or profession emoji into separate pictures.
• Leading spaces → tabs converts only indentation at the start of a line, not spaces inside it.
• Sorting uses English collation rules, so other languages may not sort in their own alphabetical order.
• Filtering is a plain substring match; regular expressions aren’t supported.
• The Characters count is in UTF-16 code units, so an emoji can count as two.
• Dropped or opened files are limited to 10 MB and must be text.

Privacy

Cleaning happens entirely in your browser; your text is never uploaded or stored. The Share button copies a link with your text and steps in its # fragment, which browsers don’t send to servers, but anyone you give the link to can read it. Send to… passes text between tools through this tab’s session storage, and it is removed as soon as the receiving tool reads it.

Frequently asked questions

Does the order of the steps matter?

Yes. Steps run top to bottom, each on the result of the ones above. For example, trimming before removing duplicates makes apple and apple count as the same line. Use the arrows to reorder steps, or Reset steps to go back to the default order.

How do I remove duplicates but keep the original order?

Turn on Remove duplicate lines and leave Sort lines off. The first copy of each line stays where it was, or the last copy with Keep last.

Can I find invisible characters in pasted text?

Turn on Strip non-printable and zero-width characters and watch the Characters count: if it drops, the text contained hidden characters such as zero-width spaces or byte order marks. Use Unicode Inspector to see exactly which ones.

Is the random shuffle repeatable?

Yes. The shuffle is seeded, so it stays the same while you edit, and a share link includes the seed. Shuffle again picks the next seed for a new order.