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How to Clean and Format Text Online

Messy text is everywhere — copied from PDFs, emails, spreadsheets, and web pages. Extra spaces, random line breaks, hidden characters, and inconsistent formatting waste time when you are trying to use that text somewhere else.

How to Use the Text Cleaner

  1. Open the FlipMyCase Text Cleaner.
  2. Paste your messy text.
  3. Toggle the cleaning options you need.
  4. Copy the cleaned result.

What the Text Cleaner Fixes

  • Extra spaces: Multiple spaces collapsed to one
  • Leading/trailing whitespace: Trimmed from every line
  • Blank lines: Empty lines removed
  • Line breaks: Joined into paragraphs or normalized
  • HTML tags: Stripped to plain text
  • Special characters: Smart quotes, em dashes, and other Word artifacts normalized

Common Scenarios

Text Copied from PDFs

PDFs break lines at arbitrary points based on page width. A single paragraph might have 10 line breaks in the middle of sentences. The Text Cleaner joins these back into proper paragraphs.

Data from Spreadsheets

When copying columns from Excel or Google Sheets, you often get trailing spaces, inconsistent whitespace, and hidden tab characters. The Text Cleaner normalizes all of it.

Web Page Content

Copying text from websites often brings along HTML formatting, non-breaking spaces ( ), and zero-width characters. The Text Cleaner strips these invisible characters.

Email Chains

Forwarded email threads accumulate > characters, extra blank lines, and messy formatting. Clean it all in one paste.

Why Clean Text Matters

Dirty text causes real problems: extra spaces break exact-match searches in databases, hidden characters cause code errors, and inconsistent formatting makes documents look unprofessional. Taking 5 seconds to clean your text saves debugging time later.

🧹 Try Text Cleaner

Free, no signup, runs in your browser. Try it now.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I remove extra spaces from text?

Paste your text into the FlipMyCase Text Cleaner and enable 'Remove extra spaces'. It collapses multiple spaces into single spaces instantly.

How do I remove line breaks from text?

Use the FlipMyCase Text Cleaner with the 'Remove line breaks' option enabled. It joins all lines into a single paragraph.

How do I clean text copied from a PDF?

PDF text often contains random line breaks, extra spaces, and special characters. Paste it into the FlipMyCase Text Cleaner to strip all formatting issues at once.

Can I remove HTML tags from text?

Yes, the FlipMyCase Text Cleaner can strip HTML tags, leaving only the plain text content.

How do I remove blank lines from text?

Enable 'Remove blank lines' in the Text Cleaner. It removes all empty lines while keeping your content lines intact.

Why does text from Word have weird formatting?

Microsoft Word uses special characters for quotes, dashes, and bullets that don't copy well into plain text. The Text Cleaner normalizes these into standard ASCII characters.

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