Text Cleaner
The text cleaner removes the artefacts that survive a copy and paste: HTML tags, smart quotes and dashes, non-breaking spaces, zero-width characters, stray line breaks and repeated blank lines. The result is plain, predictable text you can safely paste anywhere.
Messy text
Clean text
Your result will appear here.
Not sure where to start? Use Load example.
Results update automatically and are calculated on your device. Nothing you type is sent to a server.
Runs in your browser. Processing happens entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent to Delimiter.live.
How to use the Text Cleaner
- Paste the text you copied from a PDF, Word document, email or web page.
- Leave the default options on for a general clean-up, or switch individual steps off.
- Enable "Join hard-wrapped lines" if the source broke sentences across lines, as PDFs usually do.
- Copy the clean text straight into your editor or CMS.
Example
Input
<p>“Hello” — world…</p>
Output
"Hello" - world...
Common use cases
- Pasting into a CMS without dragging along invisible formatting from Word.
- Fixing PDF copy-paste where every line ends with a hard break mid-sentence.
- Removing smart quotes and en dashes before putting text into code, JSON or a CSV file.
- Finding and stripping zero-width characters that break string comparisons or search.
Limitations and things to watch for
- Removing HTML tags keeps the text between them; it does not render the HTML. Block-level tags are replaced with line breaks so paragraphs are preserved.
- Joining hard-wrapped lines uses a heuristic: a line is joined to the next when it does not end in sentence punctuation. Verse, addresses and code blocks should keep that option switched off.
Frequently asked questions
What are zero-width characters and why remove them?
Zero-width spaces and joiners are invisible Unicode characters that often ride along with copied text. They break exact string comparison, corrupt CSV imports and can make two identical-looking values fail to match.
Will it destroy my paragraph structure?
No. Blank lines between paragraphs are preserved; only repeated blank lines are collapsed into one. Turn that option off if you need the original spacing exactly.
Does removing HTML tags also remove the text inside them?
No. The tags themselves are removed and their text content is kept, with block elements converted to line breaks so the structure survives.
Is my text uploaded?
No. All cleaning happens in your browser, which matters because pasted documents often contain confidential material.