Remove formatting
Paste text copied from a document or web page and get clean plain text back.
Runs entirely in your browser — your text is never uploaded.
Why copied text carries invisible baggage
Text copied from a word processor, a PDF, or a styled web page almost never arrives as plain characters. It brings smart quotes that break code, en and em dashes where you typed hyphens, non-breaking spaces that look identical to normal ones but behave differently, and runs of tabs left over from an indented layout. None of it is visible until something downstream refuses to parse it.
This is the reason a JSON snippet pasted from a blog post fails to parse, a password pasted from an email is rejected, and a CSV import lands every row in one column. The characters look right on screen because the substitution is typographic, not semantic.
What this tool changes
Curly quotes become straight quotes, en and em dashes become hyphens, ellipsis characters become three periods, and non-breaking spaces become ordinary spaces. Runs of spaces and tabs collapse to one, trailing whitespace at the end of each line is removed, and three or more consecutive blank lines are reduced to a single blank line so paragraph breaks survive.
Line breaks themselves are preserved. If you also want to merge wrapped lines back into flowing paragraphs, use the join-lines tool instead — the two are deliberately kept separate so you can apply one without the other.
Doing it without a tool
Most applications offer a paste-as-plain-text shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows and Linux, Cmd+Shift+V or Cmd+Option+Shift+V on macOS depending on the app. That handles rich-text styling but does not normalise smart quotes or non-breaking spaces, because those are real characters in the text rather than formatting applied on top of it. That is the gap this tool fills.
Other text tools
- Case converter — Switch text between upper, lower, title, and sentence case.
- Join lines — Merge hard-wrapped lines into paragraphs, keeping real breaks.
- Word counter — Count words, characters, sentences, and reading time as you type.