# Text Cleaner

> Strip smart quotes, invisible characters, ligatures and stray whitespace pasted from Word or a PDF.

Text pasted from Word, Google Docs or a PDF carries curly quotes, en and em dashes, ligatures, zero-width spaces and non-breaking spaces that break code, CSV files and search. This cleaner replaces each with its plain ASCII equivalent and reports exactly how many it changed.

**URL:** https://convertto.tech/t/text-cleaner
**Category:** Text Tools (https://convertto.tech/c/text-tools)
**Privacy:** Runs entirely in the browser; no upload
**Cost:** Free, no sign-up
**Last updated:** 2026-08-01

## Key facts

- **Privacy:** Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded
- **Cost:** Free, unlimited, no sign-up

## How to use

1. Enter or paste your text.
2. Turn "Straighten quotes and apostrophes" on or off as needed.
3. Turn "Convert en and em dashes to hyphens" on or off as needed.
4. Turn "Expand ellipsis to three dots" on or off as needed.
5. Turn "Split ligatures (fi → fi)" on or off as needed.
6. Turn "Remove invisible characters" on or off as needed.
7. Turn "Collapse repeated spaces and blank lines" on or off as needed.
8. Turn "Remove accents (café → cafe)" on or off as needed.
9. The result appears immediately — copy or download it.

## FAQ

### Why does text from Word break my code?

Word autocorrects straight quotes into curly ones, which are different Unicode characters. A parser expecting an ASCII quote sees an unknown symbol, so the string never closes.

### What are invisible characters doing in my text?

Zero-width spaces and soft hyphens are inserted by PDF exporters and some CMSs for line-breaking control. They are invisible but still count as characters, which breaks exact matching and inflates length limits.

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