Bulk Text Cleaner and Formatter

Clean messy text in one pass

Text copied from web pages, word processors and content systems often arrives with leftover HTML tags, curly quotes, long dashes, stray spaces, empty lines and repeated lines. This tool cleans all of that in bulk, so writers, editors and web content staff can paste a block of text and get plain, consistent text back.

You choose which cleaning steps to apply. Five steps are ticked by default: strip HTML tags, replace typographic characters, trim each line, collapse spaces and remove blank lines. Removing duplicate lines is off until you tick it, and the case menu can turn everything into lowercase or UPPERCASE.

Everything runs in your browser. After each run you see how many lines and characters went in and how many came out, and the Copy button puts the cleaned text on your clipboard.

How to use the text cleaner

1. Paste or type your text into the input box. There is no length limit.
2. Tick the cleaning steps you want and pick a letter case.
3. Press Clean. The cleaned text appears in the read-only box together with the line and character counts.
4. Press Copy to put the cleaned text on your clipboard.

The seven cleaning steps, in order

First, every Windows line break (CR LF) and every lone CR becomes a plain line break (LF). Then the steps below run in this fixed order. An unticked step is skipped. Lines are split on line breaks and joined with line breaks.

1. Strip HTML tags. HTML comments are removed first, from <!-- to the next -->. Then each run that starts with < followed directly by a letter, a slash or an exclamation mark, and ends at the next >, is removed. A < followed by a space, a digit or any other character is kept as text. Finally these entities are decoded in one pass, each once: &, <, >, ", ' and   (which becomes a space). Because decoding comes after tag removal, text that was <b> stays as the visible text <b>.
2. Replace typographic characters. Curly single quotes become a straight apostrophe, curly double quotes become a straight double quote, en and em dashes become a hyphen, the ellipsis character becomes three full stops and a non-breaking space becomes a normal space.
3. Trim each line. Spaces and tabs are removed from the start and end of every line.
4. Collapse spaces. Inside a line, every run of two or more spaces or tabs becomes one space.
5. Letter case. The text is changed to lowercase or UPPERCASE if you chose one in the case menu.
6. Remove blank lines. Lines that are empty or hold only spaces and tabs are removed.
7. Remove duplicate lines. The first occurrence of each line is kept. Lines are compared exactly and case-sensitively, after all the earlier steps.