Whitespace Cleaner
Strip extra spaces, double spaces, leading/trailing whitespace, and invisible characters from any text instantly. Free and browser-based.
What Gets Cleaned
- Leading spaces — spaces at the start of each line.
- Trailing spaces — spaces at the end of each line.
- Multiple spaces — two or more consecutive spaces collapsed to one.
- Tab characters — horizontal tab characters converted to a single space.
- Non-breaking spaces — invisible Unicode spacing artifacts from web copy-paste.
When You Need This Tool
Any time you copy text from a PDF, a website, a Word document, or a legacy system, you risk importing invisible whitespace artifacts. These cause silent failures in SQL WHERE clauses, break string comparisons in code, and create misaligned columns in spreadsheets. The Whitespace Cleaner normalizes everything in one click.
How to Use the Whitespace Cleaner
Paste your text into the box and click Clean Whitespace. The tidied version appears below, ready to copy. Your original text stays in the input box, so you can edit it and clean it again at any time.
Exactly What It Does
The tool works on each line separately. It removes spaces and tabs from the start and end of the line, and it replaces any run of spaces, tabs or other whitespace inside the line with a single space. Your line breaks stay exactly where they are, and blank lines are left alone.
A Worked Example
Say you paste three lines containing extra spaces and tabs:
[tab]Name:[tab][tab]Anna
end
The result is:
Name: Anna
end
Limits Worth Knowing
- Tabs inside a line become single spaces. If your text is a tab-separated table, cleaning it will merge the columns. Do not run tab-separated data through this tool unless you want that.
- Blank lines are kept. To remove them as well, use the Empty Line Remover afterwards.
- Non-breaking spaces are treated as ordinary spaces and are replaced, which is helpful for text copied from web pages. Invisible zero-width characters, however, are not touched.
- Meaningful indentation is removed too, so avoid using this on source code where indentation matters, such as Python or YAML.
Common Uses
- Cleaning text copied from a PDF, where lines often end in stray spaces and words are separated by double spaces.
- Preparing names, addresses or product titles before importing them into a spreadsheet or database, so that "Anna Smith" and "Anna Smith " match.
- Tidying a pasted email or document before you reformat it. Follow up with the Case Converter if the capitalization also needs fixing.
Frequently Asked Questions
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