Remove extra spaces

Where extra spaces come from

Almost always from copy-and-paste: PDFs break lines and pad them with spacing to keep the layout, Word slips in double spaces after periods, spreadsheets turn cells into tabs, and OCR and web pages leave invisible non-breaking spaces ( ) scattered around. This tool tidies it all up: two or more spaces or tabs in a row become a single normal space, and the spaces at the start and end of every line go, without touching the line breaks. A single space stays as it is instead, even when it is non-breaking, because there it is usually on purpose, for instance to keep «10 km» together at the end of a line; the same goes for a single tab, which becomes spaces with the «Tabs to spaces» box.

Why stray spaces are a problem

One extra space can break a data match: in a database or a CSV, "Smith " with a trailing space does not equal "Smith", and an email address with a space at the end gets rejected by signup forms. Spaces also count toward character limits (SMS, meta descriptions, social bios), and modern typography calls for a single space after a period. The spaces-removed count tells you at a glance just how «dirty» your original text was.

Several clean-ups at once, in a fixed order

Below the box you will find all ten clean-ups of this family, and you can tick as many as you like: each page starts with its own already ticked. The program is the same on all ten, so the same text with the same boxes gives the same result on whichever page you paste it.

The order does not depend on which boxes you tick, and it is the order you see them in: first the characters (emojis, accents, numbers, punctuation), then the spaces inside each line (tabs, indentation, extra spaces), then whole lines (blank and duplicate) and last of all joining everything into one line. So a line that is left empty once the emojis are gone disappears with the blank lines, and two lines that become identical once the spaces are gone count as duplicates.

The sister pages, each with its own box already ticked: Remove indentation, Remove blank lines, Remove duplicate lines, Remove emojis, Remove accents, Remove punctuation, Remove numbers, Text on one line and Tabs to spaces.