Whitespace Cleaner

Unwanted whitespace is one of the most persistent annoyances in text processing. It appears when copying text from PDFs (which often introduce extra spaces and line breaks at PDF rendering boundaries), from Word documents (where non-breaking spaces ` ` are common), from web pages (where HTML rendering collapses whitespace visually but the raw copy retains it), from spreadsheet cells, and from code editors where trailing spaces are left by developers.

The consequences range from cosmetic (text looking oddly spaced) to functional (string comparisons failing because "hello " ≠ "hello", CSV parsing breaking on cells with leading spaces, database queries missing matches due to stored whitespace). Some systems — like some mail servers, older APIs, and certain XML parsers — are particularly sensitive to unexpected whitespace characters.

This tool offers several targeted cleaning operations: trim leading and trailing whitespace from every line; collapse multiple consecutive spaces into one; remove all blank lines; remove lines that contain only whitespace (whitespace-only lines look blank but contain spaces or tabs); convert all tab characters to spaces (with a configurable tab width); and strip non-breaking spaces (` `, Unicode U+00A0) which look identical to regular spaces but behave differently in string comparisons and some parsers.

You can apply any combination of these operations independently, and the live preview updates as you toggle each option so you can see exactly what will change before copying the result.