Remove Extra Spaces

Remove Extra Spaces applies a fixed sequence of whitespace rules to pasted text and does nothing else to it. There is no parsing, no reflowing and no correcting of your wording: every line stays in the same order and no line is ever joined to the one below it. The only lines it can take away are blank ones — empty, or holding nothing but spaces and tabs — and inside a line it only ever adds or deletes spacing and invisible formatting characters, never a letter or a digit.

Each rule is a separate switch. Collapse repeated spaces turns any run of two or more spaces or tabs into a single space. Trim spaces at the start and end of each line strips leading and trailing spaces and tabs from every line, indentation included. Blank lines can be left as they are, capped at one in a row, or removed completely. Tabs can be left alone, expanded to between one and twelve spaces, or deleted. Normalising unusual spaces converts the no-break space, the narrow and medium spaces, the ideographic and Ogham spaces and the en-quad-to-hair-space range into ordinary spaces, then deletes zero-width spaces, zero-width joiners, the word joiner, a byte-order mark and soft hyphens.

Fix spacing around punctuation is the one rule that guesses, which is why it is switched off until you ask for it. It removes a space sitting before a comma, full stop, semicolon, colon, question mark, exclamation mark, per cent sign or closing round or square bracket, removes a space just after an opening round or square bracket, adds a single space after a comma, semicolon or colon unless a digit or a slash follows, and adds a space between a sentence-ending mark and the capital letter after it whenever a lowercase letter or a digit sits immediately before that mark. Curly braces are not in that list and are left alone. Web addresses, www-prefixed hosts and email addresses are lifted out before those rules run and put back afterwards so they survive intact. Nothing else is shielded: a bare filename written as report.PDF comes back as report. PDF, and a path such as /var/log/App.Log is split the same way, because the rule cannot tell either from a missing space between two sentences.

The structural limits are worth knowing before you paste. Collapsing and trimming both destroy indentation, so this is the wrong tool for source code, YAML or Python, and a tab-separated table loses its columns wherever two or more tabs sit next to each other. Deleting the zero-width characters is not always harmless either: a multi-person emoji held together by joiners falls apart into its separate figures, and Persian, Arabic or Indic text loses the non-joiner that keeps neighbouring letters from fusing, so that switch belongs off for writing of those kinds. Windows and classic-Mac line endings are converted to plain newlines on the way in, and whatever the settings say, the output always has its leading empty lines and all of its trailing whitespace removed. Other control codes and the Unicode line separators are not in the list above and pass through untouched. All of this happens in this browser tab — the text is not uploaded, and the tool keeps working with the network off — which is also why it is a paste-in, copy-out tool with no file picker and no download.

Runs on your device. Your file is processed directly in this browser.