Text cleaner.

Copy a paragraph out of a PDF and paste it into your CMS. It arrives with a line break at the end of every printed line, so the text wraps in the wrong places on every screen width. Copy from Word and you inherit curly quotes, en dashes and non-breaking spaces that break your search function and occasionally your JSON. Copy from a website and you may collect zero-width characters that make two identical-looking strings fail to match.

Each of those is a separate toggle here, all on by default. The most useful is removing single line breaks while keeping paragraph breaks intact — that is what turns PDF text back into flowing paragraphs without collapsing the whole thing into one block.

The invisible character option is the one that saves the most debugging time. Zero-width spaces, soft hyphens and byte-order marks survive copy and paste, show up nowhere, and cause bugs that look impossible until you find them.

Worth knowing

• Run pasted text through this before it goes into a CMS, not after you notice the layout is wrong.
• Keep smart quotes for body copy meant for reading; straighten them for code, CSV and data fields.
• If two strings look identical but do not match, an invisible character is almost always the reason.