Whitespace Cleaner - Remove Extra Spaces Online

The four cleanup options

Trim each line removes spaces and tabs from the start and end of every line. It fixes indentation left over from emails and the trailing spaces most editors do not show you.

Collapse spaces turns any run of spaces or tabs inside a line into exactly one space. Three spaces become one. A tab between two words becomes a space. It does not touch line breaks, so your paragraphs stay separate.

Remove blank lines deletes empty lines. With trim on, a line that only held spaces or tabs is empty too, so it goes as well. Use it for lists and data. Leave it off for prose if you want to keep the empty line between paragraphs.

The invisible-character option converts non-breaking spaces (U+00A0) to normal spaces and deletes zero-width characters: the zero-width space (U+200B), zero-width non-joiner (U+200C), zero-width joiner (U+200D), and the byte order mark (U+FEFF). This is the option that fixes problems you cannot see.

Worked example

Say you copy two lines from a PDF invoice. The first line has two leading spaces, a non-breaking space between Invoice and total, three spaces before $1,250, and two trailing spaces. Then comes an empty line. The second line starts with two tabs, has a zero-width space hiding after Due date:, and ends with two spaces. That is 49 characters.

With all four options on, you get two clean lines: Invoice total: $1,250 and Due date: Oct 1. That is 37 characters, so the counter reports 12 removed: 2 leading spaces, 2 extra spaces in the gap, 2 trailing spaces, 1 blank line break, 2 tabs, 1 zero-width space, and 2 more trailing spaces. The non-breaking space is replaced, not removed, so it does not count.

Invisible characters cause real bugs

A non-breaking space prints exactly like a normal space, but software treats it as a different character. A spreadsheet VLOOKUP for John Smith will not match John Smith if one of them has U+00A0 in the middle. A find-and-replace for double spaces will skip it. Excel's TRIM function does not remove it either, which catches a lot of people.

Zero-width characters are worse, because they have no width at all. They arrive in text copied from websites, chat apps, and some CMS editors. The byte order mark sneaks into the start of files saved by older Windows tools. Symptoms: a password that is correct but fails, a CSV header that does not match, a URL that 404s, a JSON key that looks right but is not found, or a word count that is off by one.

If two strings look identical and your code or spreadsheet says they are not, run both through this cleaner and compare again.

Where messy whitespace comes from

PDFs are the biggest offender. They store text as positioned fragments, so copying adds hard line breaks, double spaces where justified text was stretched, and tabs where columns were. Word documents add non-breaking spaces after certain punctuation and in auto-formatted text. Spreadsheet exports pad cells with trailing spaces. Emails add indentation on quoted replies. HTML pages copied into a doc bring   characters along as U+00A0.

Mistakes to avoid

Cleaning code or Markdown with every option on. Python uses indentation as syntax, and Markdown uses leading spaces for nested lists and code blocks. Trim and collapse will flatten both. For code, only use the invisible character fix.

Removing blank lines in prose. Paragraphs are separated by an empty line in most plain text formats. Delete those and your whole document becomes one block. Keep that option off unless you are cleaning a list.

Assuming the cleaner fixes broken line wraps. Text from a PDF often has a hard line break in the middle of every sentence. This tool keeps line breaks as they are, apart from removing empty lines. Rejoining wrapped lines is a separate job.