Remove Extra Spaces – Clean Up Pasted Text

How to use the extra space remover

1. Paste your text, or press Try an example.
2. Choose what to clean:
   • Turn multiple spaces into one
   • Trim the start and end of each line
   • Remove blank lines
   • Replace tabs with spaces
   • Join all lines into one paragraph
3. Copy the clean text. The status line shows how many characters were removed.

Example

Before:

  This   text was    pasted	from a PDF.


   It has   double spaces,  tabs	and blank lines.

After (default options):

This text was pasted from a PDF.
It has double spaces, tabs and blank lines.

Where messy spacing comes from

• PDFs store text by position on the page, so copying gives a line break at the end of every visual line and sometimes extra spaces for justified text.
• Emails may insert line breaks at about 72 characters and add indentation for quoted replies.
• Web pages use non-breaking spaces and invisible formatting characters.
• Word processors can hide tabs and double spaces after full stops — once common with typewriters.
• Spreadsheets add tabs between columns when you copy cells.

Why it matters

Extra spaces make text look sloppy when you paste it into a website, a form or a document. They can also break data: “London ” with a trailing space isn’t the same as “London” in a spreadsheet lookup, a database or a mailing list. Cleaning the text first avoids those hidden mismatches.

Tips

• Join lines for prose, keep lines for lists and addresses.
• Remove duplicates afterwards with remove duplicate lines — trailing spaces are a common cause of “duplicates” that don’t look identical.
• Fix capitalisation with the case converter.
• Replace specific characters, such as bullet symbols or odd dashes, with find and replace.

Hidden characters

Some characters are invisible but still cause problems: non-breaking spaces from web pages, zero-width spaces from some editors, and tab characters from spreadsheets. The cleaner converts non-breaking spaces and tabs into ordinary spaces before collapsing them, so the result contains only plain spaces and line breaks.

Cleaning data for spreadsheets and forms

Before pasting a list into a spreadsheet, a CRM or an online form, trim each line so values such as names, emails and postcodes match exactly. A single stray space at the end of “SW1A 1AA ” can make a lookup fail or create a second, near-identical record.

Keeping indentation

If you are cleaning code or a nested list where leading spaces matter, untick “Trim the start and end of each line” and “Replace tabs with spaces” so indentation stays.

One space or two after a full stop?

Two spaces after a sentence was a typewriter convention. Modern style guides — including the major American and British ones — recommend one space, and web browsers collapse extra spaces anyway. This tool turns double spaces into single spaces everywhere.

Count characters before and after with the character counter.