Text Cleaner

Copy-paste between applications is the source of most text messiness. When you copy from a Word document, a PDF, or a webpage, you pick up not just the visible text but also hidden Unicode characters: smart quotes (curly instead of straight), em-dashes and en-dashes, non-breaking spaces, zero-width characters, BOM markers, soft hyphens. Each of these can cause problems in code, JSON, URLs, or strict CMS systems that expect plain ASCII.

The cleanest fix is to normalize everything to ASCII equivalents where possible. Smart quotes become straight quotes; em-dashes and en-dashes become hyphens; non-breaking spaces become regular spaces; zero-width characters are removed. After that, multiple spaces collapse to one, multiple blank lines collapse to one, leading and trailing whitespace per line is stripped. The result is plain, predictable text that won't surprise your downstream tools.

For writers moving text from a Word document into a CMS or a code editor, this cleanup is essential — otherwise you'll spend ten minutes hunting for the invisible non-breaking space that's breaking your JSON or your Python indent. Run the text through this tool first, then paste it into the destination.