Whitespace Remover

Toggle any combination of four options: trim lines (removes leading and trailing spaces from each line), remove blank lines (deletes empty lines so the text closes up), collapse spaces (replaces runs of multiple spaces with a single space), and remove all whitespace (the nuclear option, strips every space, tab, and line break). Output updates live as you toggle. The first three are usually combined; the fourth is for special cases like generating a slug or a hash input.

Real example. Paste this in: ' Hello World \n\nThis has extra spaces' and turn on 'Trim lines' + 'Collapse spaces' + 'Remove blank lines'. Output: 'Hello World\nThis has extra spaces'. Two of the original 17 problem characters survive; the rest are gone. This is the single most common cleanup you will run on text copied out of PDFs, scraped websites, or messy email threads.

Trim lines targets only line beginnings and ends, leaving spaces inside a line untouched - so 'word word' stays 'word word' but ' word word ' becomes 'word word'. Collapse spaces targets every run of two or more spaces inside a line, replacing them with one space - 'word word' becomes 'word word'. Run both together and 'word word' becomes 'word word' with no leading or trailing space. Remove blank lines acts on whole lines that contain nothing or only whitespace, dropping them entirely.

'Remove all whitespace' is exactly what it says: every space, tab, and newline disappears. 'Hello World' becomes 'HelloWorld'. Use it for generating clean strings to feed into hash functions, URL slugs (though the [slug generator](/slug-generator) is purpose-built for that), or compact concatenations. Most of the time you do not want this; you want trim + collapse + remove blanks instead.

Pasting text out of a PDF: turn on all three of trim, collapse, and remove blanks. PDFs typically introduce trailing spaces, double-spaces between sentences, and blank lines between paragraphs that you do not want. Cleaning up text scraped from a website: same combination, plus consider running it through the [find and replace](/find-and-replace) tool afterwards to fix curly quotes or non-breaking spaces. Cleaning up code copied from Stack Overflow: just trim lines, since you want to keep blank lines and indentation intact.

One thing this tool does not handle: invisible Unicode characters like zero-width spaces (U+200B), zero-width joiners (U+200D), or non-breaking spaces (U+00A0). Those are not detected as 'whitespace' by JavaScript's regular whitespace pattern. If a line still looks misaligned after running the tool, copy it into a hex viewer or use the [find and replace](/find-and-replace) with regex mode to target those specific codepoints. The [text diff](/text-diff) tool will also reveal mystery whitespace differences when comparing two versions of the same paragraph.