Whitespace Remover
Remove extra spaces, tabs, and line breaks from text.
Written by Anil Gautam · Updated
Which characters does the whitespace remover clean up?
Every run of whitespace becomes one ordinary space, and whitespace at the very start and end is removed, so the result is always a single line. Whitespace here means everything in the JavaScript \s class: spaces, tabs, line breaks and form feeds, plus Unicode spaces such as the non-breaking space (U+00A0), the em space and the ideographic space used in Chinese and Japanese text. A non-breaking space therefore comes out as a normal space.
Take a 58-character note: "Meeting moved to Friday." with two spaces in front and three before Friday, then a blank line, then "Bring the signed forms." indented with a tab, with three spaces before signed and two at the end. The output is the 48-character line "Meeting moved to Friday. Bring the signed forms."
Two things are left alone. A zero-width space (U+200B) does not count as whitespace here, so it stays in the output, invisible. Spaces before punctuation are only shrunk to one, so "Hello , world ." keeps its gaps before the comma and the full stop.
How do I remove extra spaces but keep paragraphs?
Use Line Break Remover in its Keep paragraphs mode. It joins the broken lines inside each paragraph, keeps the blank line between paragraphs and, with Also collapse double spaces ticked, shrinks repeated spaces and tabs. Its Remove empty lines only mode deletes blank lines and leaves every other line where it is. This tool suits text that should end up on one line, such as a sentence copied from a PDF or a value pasted into a form field.
Can I remove every space, and is table data safe?
One space always remains between words. To delete spaces completely, for example to turn a product code written as XK 204 77 into XK20477, clean the text here first, then use Find and Replace with a single space in Find and nothing in Replace with.
Text copied from a spreadsheet loses its structure. Cells arrive separated by tabs and rows by line breaks, and both become plain spaces, so a table with the headings Name and City and one row for Asha Rao in New Delhi turns into "Name City Asha Rao New Delhi", with no way to tell where one cell ends. Compare Lists can send a result here through its Send to menu, and everything is processed in your browser.