Clean up messy text by collapsing repeated spaces between words and trimming leading and trailing whitespace from every line. Optionally remove blank lines and tab characters too, with a before/after character count.
Redundant spaces, tabs, and blank lines creep into text for a variety of ordinary, everyday reasons: copying content from a PDF or web page often preserves layout-driven spacing that made sense visually in its original context but looks messy as plain text, double-spacing after sentences is a formatting habit some writers still use from typewriter conventions, and combining content from multiple sources (an email quoted in a document, a spreadsheet cell pasted into a form) frequently mixes different whitespace conventions together. None of this is usually intentional — it's simply an artifact of how text moves between different tools and formats, which is exactly why a dedicated whitespace-cleanup tool is useful rather than expecting to catch every instance by eye.
The core operation here is straightforward: wherever your text has two or more consecutive space characters between words, they're reduced down to exactly one space, restoring normal, single-spaced word separation throughout. This is applied uniformly across your entire text, line by line, so it doesn't matter whether the extra spacing appears once near the beginning or repeatedly throughout a long passage — every instance is normalized the same way. Only genuinely single spaces are left completely untouched, since a single space between words is already correctly formatted and needs no adjustment.
Beyond collapsing spaces within a line, this tool also strips any spaces sitting at the very start or end of every individual line in your text, not just the first and last line of the whole document. This catches a common but easy-to-miss problem: a line buried in the middle of a longer passage that has an accidental leading space (making it look slightly indented compared to the lines around it) or a trailing space (invisible in most editors, but present in the underlying text). Cleaning every line individually, rather than only the outer edges of the whole text block, produces a more thoroughly and consistently formatted result.
The Remove Blank Lines option goes a step further than basic space cleanup by deleting entire empty lines from your text, which is useful when you want a tightly packed result with no gaps — for example, preparing a list of items for import into another system that doesn't expect blank separator lines between entries. The Remove Tab Characters option converts every tab into a plain space before the rest of the cleanup runs, which matters because tabs render inconsistently across different editors and contexts (some show a fixed width, others a variable width based on tab-stop settings) — converting to a plain space produces more predictable, portable results once the text is pasted somewhere else.
Reach for this tool whenever you're about to publish, submit, or reuse text that was copy-pasted from another source and might carry inconsistent or excessive whitespace along with it — cleaning up a pasted email before quoting it, tidying a list exported from a spreadsheet before importing it elsewhere, or preparing body copy for a web page or document where extra whitespace would look sloppy or, in some display contexts, actually render as visible unwanted gaps. It's not the right tool for source code or anything relying on meaningful indentation, since collapsing spaces and stripping line-leading whitespace would destroy that structure rather than clean it up — for that kind of content, a code formatter designed for the specific language is the appropriate tool instead.
Remove Extra Spaces cleans up whitespace throughout your text. These related text tools cover other everyday text cleanup and analysis tasks.