Remove extra spaces and messy whitespace from any text
Text copied from PDFs, emails, web pages and spreadsheets is often full of whitespace you cannot see: double spaces between words, spaces at the ends of lines, stray tabs, piles of blank lines, and invisible characters such as non-breaking spaces and zero-width spaces. The Remove Extra Spaces tool finds and fixes all of them in one pass.
Before you change anything, it tells you what it found — for example “6 runs of repeated spaces · 2 tabs · 1 zero-width character” — so you know why a search, a formula or a duplicate check was failing. Then pick exactly which fixes to apply with clear checkboxes. Sensible defaults are already ticked, the cleaned text updates live, and everything stays in your browser.
How to use the Remove Extra Spaces
- Paste your text into “Your text”. The “Found” line lists the whitespace problems it contains.
- Review the options under Spaces and Lines. The defaults collapse repeated spaces, trim every line, fix special spaces, squeeze blank lines and trim the very start and end.
- Tick “Convert tabs to spaces” and choose a tab width if you need tabs turned into aligned spaces, or “Remove all spaces and tabs” to strip them completely.
- Tick “Remove all blank lines” if you want no empty lines at all.
- Check the before → after counts, then copy or download the cleaned text.
Remove Extra Spaces features
Shows what is wrong first
Counts repeated spaces, tabs, trailing spaces, non-breaking spaces, zero-width characters and extra blank lines before cleaning.
Fixes invisible characters
Turns non-breaking, thin, en, em and ideographic spaces into normal spaces, and deletes zero-width spaces, word joiners and stray byte-order marks.
Emoji- and script-safe
Zero-width joiners and non-joiners are left alone, because emoji such as 👨👩👧 and scripts such as Hindi and Persian depend on them.
Proper tab stops
Tabs are expanded to the next 2-, 4- or 8-column stop, the way a code editor does, so columns stay aligned.
Line and blank-line control
Trim each line, collapse runs of blank lines into one, or remove blank lines entirely.
The invisible characters that cause trouble
| Character | Code | Where it comes from | What this tool does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Non-breaking space | U+00A0 | Word processors, web pages ( ), French punctuation | Replaces with a normal space |
| Narrow / thin / en / em spaces | U+2000–U+200A, U+202F | Typesetting, PDFs, number formatting | Replaces with a normal space |
| Ideographic space | U+3000 | Chinese, Japanese and Korean text | Replaces with a normal space |
| Zero-width space | U+200B | Web pages, chat apps, copy-paste | Removes it |
| Byte-order mark | U+FEFF | Files saved by some Windows editors | Removes it |
| Tab | U+0009 | Spreadsheets, code, aligned text | Collapses, expands or removes it — your choice |
Why extra spaces matter
To a person, “New York” and “New York” look identical, but to a computer they are different strings. Hidden spaces make Excel lookups and VLOOKUP fail, stop duplicate removal from matching, break CSV imports and email addresses, and make word counts wrong. Double spaces after full stops are a typewriter habit that looks uneven in modern fonts, and trailing whitespace creates noisy differences in code reviews.
Cleaning text also helps when you paste into forms with character limits, because every invisible character still counts. After cleaning, check lengths with the Character Counter.
Tips
- Text from a PDF also has a line break at the end of every line. Clean the spaces here, then join the lines with Remove Line Breaks.
- For code or tab-separated data, untick “Collapse repeated spaces and tabs” and “Trim spaces at the start…” to keep indentation and columns, and use only the blank-line clean-up.
- Windows (CRLF) line endings are converted to standard line breaks automatically, so the result pastes cleanly into any program.
- Need to insert an invisible character on purpose, such as a blank name or an empty message? Use the Invisible Character tool.
Remove Extra Spaces FAQ
How do I remove extra spaces between words?
Paste your text and keep “Collapse repeated spaces and tabs into one space” ticked. Every tab and every run of two or more spaces between words becomes a single space, and the cleaned text appears instantly.
How do I remove spaces at the end of every line?
Keep “Trim spaces at the start and end of each line” ticked. It removes leading and trailing spaces and tabs from every line without touching the text in between.
What is a non-breaking space and why remove it?
A non-breaking space (U+00A0) looks like a normal space but stops a line from wrapping at that point. Word processors and web pages insert them, and they make searches, lookups and duplicate checks fail because they are not the same character as a regular space.
Will this remove the line breaks in my text?
No. Line breaks and paragraphs are kept, apart from extra blank lines if you choose to collapse or remove them. To join lines into one paragraph, use the Remove Line Breaks tool.
Does removing zero-width characters break emoji?
No. This tool removes zero-width spaces, word joiners and byte-order marks, but keeps zero-width joiners and non-joiners, which emoji sequences and several writing systems need.
Is my text uploaded?
No. All cleaning runs in your browser, so the text never leaves your device.