Whitespace Cleaner
Strip the invisible mess out of copied text
Input
Options
Result
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Paste your text and the cleaned version appears here.
Finds non-breaking spaces, ideographic spaces, zero-width characters and byte order marks.
Text copied from a website or a PDF carries characters you cannot see: non-breaking spaces, zero-width joiners, byte order marks. They break search, comparison and layout in ways that are maddening to debug. This tool finds them and cleans them out.
How to use
- 1 Paste text copied from a web page, PDF or word processor.
- 2 The number of invisible characters found is shown immediately.
- 3 Choose what to clean — doubled spaces, blank lines, line breaks.
- 4 Copy the cleaned result.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as an invisible character?
Non-breaking space (U+00A0), the ideographic space (U+3000), zero-width space and joiner (U+200B–U+200D), and the byte order mark (U+FEFF). They render as blank or nothing at all but are not ordinary spaces.
Why does my search fail on text that clearly contains the word?
Almost always a non-breaking space where a normal space should be. They look identical, but no search will match across them. Converting them to ordinary spaces fixes it.
What does "remove all line breaks" do?
It joins everything into a single paragraph, which is what you want when text pasted from a PDF breaks mid-sentence at every line.