Whitespace Cleaner

What this tool does

A whitespace cleaner changes spacing, not wording. This whitespace cleaner can trim leading and trailing whitespace, collapse repeated spaces and tabs on a line, normalize CR/LF line breaks to LF, and collapse extra blank lines down to a single blank line. Each option is a checkbox. Unchecked steps are skipped. The original paste stays visible. Nothing is uploaded.

That is broader than one find-and-replace. Replacing two spaces with one misses three spaces, tabs, and Windows line endings. The Find and Replace page is for a chosen phrase. This page is for “make the spacing ordinary.” It does not change case. Use the Case Converter after you like the spaces.

How to use

1. Paste the text.
2. Leave the four options on for a typical cleanup, or uncheck the ones you want to keep.
3. Clean. Copy writes the result. Example is a messy two-block paste with tabs and extra blanks.

If every option is off, the tool asks you to choose at least one. Empty input is an error. Input over 200,000 characters is refused.

Example

Example input has leading spaces, three spaces between words, a CR/LF pair, three blank lines, and two tabs:

  hello   world

second		line  

With all options on, the result is hello world, one blank line, second line. Edges are trimmed, repeated horizontal space becomes one space, line breaks are LF, and three blanks become one. Words are not rewritten.

Limits

• Collapse spaces does not touch newlines. It only squeezes spaces and tabs (and other horizontal whitespace) on a line.
• Collapse extra blank lines turns three or more newlines into two (one empty line). It does not delete every blank. If you need a single block, that is a different edit.
• Trim removes leading and trailing whitespace of the whole text and also trailing spaces at the end of each line.
• The tool does not convert tabs to a chosen number of spaces as a tab-stop editor would. Tabs become a single space when collapse is on.
• Non-breaking spaces are whitespace and will collapse or trim with the rest.

Pasted HTML is text. Cleaning spaces around a <div> does not create a DOM node. If you needed to replace a word, go to Find and Replace. If you needed a URL slug after cleanup, generate the slug from the cleaned title so hyphens are not built on leftover double spaces.

Cleanup runs in this tab. People often paste from email, where a visual wrap is not a line break, and then wonder why “collapse blank lines” did nothing. If you see one long line in the box, there were no extra blanks to collapse. Add real breaks, or leave the line as one paragraph.

Choose the options that match the job. A poem may want trim and normalized breaks but not collapsed blanks. A scraped paragraph may want all four. The tool will not guess. Unchecked boxes are a promise that those spaces will still be there after Clean. The status says “Cleaned” only after a successful pass.