Text Cleaner

Text copied from PDFs, websites, and word processors carries invisible formatting artifacts that this tool rewrites with simple find-and-replace rules. With the default toggles on it does four things: it converts each tab character to a single space, collapses any run of two or more ASCII spaces down to one, trims leading and trailing whitespace from every line (and the whole string), and replaces a small set of typographic characters with ASCII equivalents. The smart-quote rule maps curly single quotes to a straight apostrophe, curly double quotes to a straight double quote, a horizontal ellipsis to three periods, and both en-dashes and em-dashes to a single hyphen. An optional 'remove line breaks' toggle (off by default) joins every line into one by turning newline runs into a space. The rules are intentionally minimal and operate on specific characters, so they are fast and predictable but not exhaustive. Notably, a non-breaking space (the most common artifact in Word and web paste) is not an ASCII space and passes through untouched, and zero-width characters are left in place. For full Unicode normalization, reach for a dedicated library or your editor's normalize command.