Remove Extra Spaces
Collapse double spaces and tabs, trim each line and fix mixed line endings while keeping your paragraphs. Ideal for text copied from PDFs and emails. Free tool.
What is the Remove Extra Spaces?
Text copied from PDFs, emails, web pages and spreadsheets often arrives with double spaces, stray tabs and invisible padding at the start or end of lines. Remove Extra Spaces tidies all of that in one pass. Runs of spaces and tabs inside a line shrink to a single space, every line is trimmed, and leading and trailing blank space around the whole text is removed.
Unlike tools that squash everything onto one line, this cleaner keeps your line breaks and the blank lines between paragraphs, so the structure of your writing survives. Windows and old Mac line endings are converted to standard line breaks as well. Paste text or open a local file, press Process, and copy the clean text back to wherever you need it or download it as a text file.
How to use the Remove Extra Spaces
- Paste the messy text into the Text box, or press Open a text file to load a local .txt, .csv, .json, .md, .html, .xml or .log file of up to 5 MB.
- Press Process to clean the spacing.
- Check the result: double spaces and tabs become single spaces and each line is trimmed.
- Confirm your paragraph breaks are still in place.
- Press Copy result to reuse the clean text, Download to save it as clean-text.txt, or Reset to start over.
Features
- Collapses any run of spaces, tabs and other horizontal whitespace inside a line into one space.
- Trims leading and trailing spaces from every line.
- Removes blank space at the very beginning and end of the text.
- Keeps line breaks and the blank lines between paragraphs.
- Converts Windows (CRLF) and old Mac (CR) line endings to standard line feeds.
Why use this remove extra spaces
- Cleans text pasted from PDFs and emails before it goes into a blog post or document.
- Fixes spacing in names, addresses and product data before importing to a spreadsheet or database.
- Prepares lists for duplicate removal by eliminating hidden spacing differences.
- Runs privately in your browser with no sign-up, and saves the cleaned text as a file in one click.
How it works
Normalize line endings; collapse non-newline whitespace within each line; trim lines and the complete result.
Examples
Padded lines with a paragraph break
Input: Hello world Keep this line.
Result: Hello world Keep this line.
Tabs and double spaces in a form field
Input: Name: Asha Patil
Result: Name: Asha Patil
Results are estimates for general information, not financial, medical, legal, tax, or property advice. Confirm important figures with the relevant institution or a qualified professional.
Remove Extra Spaces: frequently asked questions
Will it merge my paragraphs into one line?
No. Line breaks are kept, including the empty lines between paragraphs, so headings, lists and paragraphs stay separate. Only the spacing inside each line is tightened and each line is trimmed. Blank space at the very start and end of the whole text is removed, but blank lines in the middle remain as they are.
Does it remove tabs?
Yes. Tabs are treated as horizontal whitespace, so any mix of tabs and spaces inside a line becomes a single space, and tabs at the start or end of a line are trimmed away. This is useful for text copied out of tables, but it also means any column alignment that depended on tabs will be lost.
Can I use it to clean source code?
It is not a good fit for code. Indentation is removed because every line is trimmed, and spaces inside strings are collapsed too, which can break Python, YAML, Markdown and other formats where spacing matters. Use it on prose, lists and data values. For code, use a formatter designed for that language instead.
Does it remove non-breaking spaces?
Yes. Non-breaking spaces and other Unicode space characters count as whitespace, so they are collapsed to a normal space inside a line and trimmed from the ends. This helps when text from a web page or word processor contains spaces that look normal but cause mismatches in searches, spreadsheets or duplicate checks.
Does it reduce multiple blank lines to one?
No. Each blank line between paragraphs is kept, so three empty lines in a row stay three empty lines, although any spaces sitting on them are removed. Only blank lines at the very top and bottom of the text disappear. To drop repeated empty lines, run the result through the Remove Duplicate Lines tool, which keeps a single blank line.