Remove Extra Spaces
Collapse multiple spaces into one and trim messy whitespace.
How to use the Remove Extra Spaces
- Paste your text.
- The cleaned version appears instantly — copy it out.
About the Remove Extra Spaces
The real job here is cleaning up text that came from somewhere else. Copy a paragraph out of a PDF and the original column layout leaves ragged runs of spaces in the middle of sentences. Quote an email and you inherit leading spaces on every line. Paste from a spreadsheet and you get tabs between the values. All three flatten out here.
Precisely what happens, line by line: every run of spaces and tabs collapses to a single space, then any leading and trailing whitespace is trimmed away. Tabs are included in that — a tab becomes a space, so spreadsheet columns pasted as text lose their alignment. That is what you want for prose and not what you want if you were trying to keep a table. Line breaks are never touched, so your line structure survives exactly as it was, and blank lines stay blank. To remove those as well, use the empty lines remover.
Trailing spaces deserve special mention, because they are invisible and cause real problems. They break exact-match lookups in spreadsheets, they make two identical-looking lines count as different in the duplicate line remover, and they survive being pasted into forms that validate strictly. Trimming them is the main reason to run text through here even when the spacing already looks fine. Everything runs in your browser, so nothing is uploaded.
Frequently asked questions
Does it remove line breaks?
No. Your line structure is preserved exactly — only spaces and tabs within and around each line are cleaned up. If you want blank lines gone as well, use the remove empty lines tool.
Does it handle tabs?
Yes. Tabs are treated as whitespace, so a run of tabs and spaces collapses to a single space. This means tab-separated data pasted from a spreadsheet loses its column alignment — clean prose, not tables, is what this is for.
Are blank lines removed?
No. A line containing only spaces is trimmed down to an empty line, but the line itself stays, so your paragraph breaks survive. Use the remove empty lines tool to delete them.
Why does text copied from a PDF have such strange spacing?
A PDF stores the position of each piece of text rather than a flowing paragraph, so copying it reconstructs the spacing from the visual layout — including the gaps that came from columns and justified alignment. Collapsing runs of spaces fixes most of it.
Does it change single spaces between words?
No. A single space is already correct and is left alone. Only runs of two or more spaces or tabs are collapsed, plus whitespace at the start and end of each line.