About the Text Cleaner
Text from Word, web pages, PDFs and chat apps carries characters you cannot see: zero-width spaces, soft hyphens, non-breaking spaces and curly quotes. They break code, searches, spreadsheets and CMS fields. The cleaner removes each kind on its own switch and tells you how many of each it found.
How to use it
- Paste the text.
- Choose what to fix.
- Read the report of what was changed, then copy the clean text.
Example
- Input
- “Smart” quotes, a zerowidth space, and a non-breaking space.
- Result
- "Smart" quotes, a zerowidth space, and a non-breaking space. (2 quotes, 1 invisible, 1 NBSP)
Questions
What is a zero-width space?
U+200B, a character with no width. It is invisible on screen but makes two identical-looking words different to a computer. It often comes from web pages and messaging apps.
Why straighten curly quotes?
Code, JSON, CSV files and many forms expect straight quotes (" and '). Curly quotes from word processors cause parse errors.
Will it strip formatting like bold?
Pasting into a plain text box already drops bold and italic. Turn on Strip HTML tags if you pasted HTML source.