Text Cleaner & Formatter

Text copied out of a PDF arrives with a line break at the end of every visual line rather than every paragraph, because the PDF stores positions rather than sentences. Paste it into a document and you get a column of fragments that reflows badly at any other width.

Text copied from a web page brings invisible passengers: non-breaking spaces that look identical to normal spaces but never wrap, zero-width characters used for tracking or ligature control, and smart quotes that break string literals when pasted into code.

Text from chat and social platforms carries emoji, and emoji are not one character each. A single flag or skin-toned emoji can be four or more code points joined by invisible modifiers, which is why deleting one with backspace sometimes takes several presses.

Strip HTML tags first if the source was a web page, because tag removal can leave behind the stray whitespace that the other passes are designed to collapse. Then remove emoji and symbols, then collapse duplicate blank lines, and change case last.

Case conversion is the step most likely to need a human afterwards. Title Case capitalises every word, including the articles and prepositions that most style guides want left lowercase, so read the result rather than trusting it for headlines.

Find and replace runs globally and updates as you type, which makes it useful for the tedious jobs: swapping a product name across a document, normalising a spelling, or removing a repeated prefix from every line.