Remove Extra Spaces

• Runs of spaces and tabs inside a line become a single space.
• Leading and trailing spaces on every line are removed.
• Three or more line breaks in a row are reduced to one blank line, so paragraphs stay separated.
• Leading and trailing blank lines at the start and end of the text are removed.

It does not change your words, punctuation, capitalisation or single line breaks. If you also need to fix capitalisation, use the Case Converter afterwards.

Text copied from a PDF often carries hard line breaks at the end of every visual line and extra spaces used for justification. Emails and web pages add non-breaking spaces and indentation. Spreadsheets paste with tab characters between cells, and old typewriter habits leave two spaces after every full stop.

These problems are invisible on screen but cause real trouble: double spaces look sloppy in published copy, trailing spaces break data imports and code comparisons, and stray tabs throw off alignment in a CMS.

Two spaces after a sentence was a typewriter convention, needed because every character had the same width. Modern style guides, including APA, Chicago and AP, recommend a single space, and web browsers collapse multiple spaces anyway, so double spaces only cause inconsistency. Cleaning them before publishing keeps word processors, CMS editors and search snippets consistent.

If you are preparing a list for a spreadsheet or database, clean the whitespace first, then use the List Sorter to remove duplicates and alphabetise. To add the same text to the start or end of every line, for example quotes or HTML tags, use Add Prefix and Suffix. To replace a specific word or character everywhere, use Find and Replace.

• Cleaning code or poetry. Indentation in code and line spacing in poems are meaningful. Cleaning will flatten them, so only clean prose and data.
• Expecting it to fix line breaks inside sentences. PDF text often breaks lines mid-sentence. That needs a deliberate find-and-replace of line breaks, because the tool cannot know which breaks you meant.
• Forgetting non-breaking spaces. Text from web pages can contain non-breaking spaces that look identical to normal ones. They are treated as spaces here and collapsed, but other tools may not see them.
• Cleaning after formatting. Clean whitespace first, then convert case and add prefixes or suffixes, so those steps work on tidy input.

Before you clean, the report shows how many extra spaces there are (spaces beyond the first in any run, plus spaces at the start or end of a line), how many tabs, and how many extra blank lines. Single spaces between words are never counted, so a figure of zero means your text is already tidy.