What Is TextCleanr and What Can You Do With It?

Updated

TextCleanr is a free, browser-based text cleanup tool for fixing text that gets mangled when you copy and paste between applications. Paste your text into the box, choose the cleanup options you need, and copy the cleaned result back out. It's aimed at everyday formatting problems—stray spaces, broken line breaks, email indentation, Word-specific characters, leftover HTML—plus a few extras like Base64/UUencode conversion, find-and-replace, and URL shortening. The site states that it doesn't save or store any data you enter, which matters if you're pasting anything sensitive.

What TextCleanr can clean up

The tool groups its options into a single form, so you can combine several fixes in one pass. Based on the site's own option list, it handles:

  • Email indents — leave them, do nothing, or remove them (useful for quoted reply chains).
  • Text case — all lowercase, all uppercase, capitalize every word, or sentence case.
  • HTML — remove brackets or strip tags down to characters.
  • Line breaks — remove all new lines, convert to a single new line, or collapse to single spaces.
  • Spaces — remove extra spaces and tabs, remove all spaces, or trim leading/trailing whitespace.
  • MS Word specific characters — leave them or replace them (handy for smart quotes and other paste artifacts).
  • Unicode — leave it or remove it.
  • URLs — leave them, remove them, shorten them via tiny.tw, or turn them into hyperlinks.
  • Encoding — md5, uuencode/uudecode, and base64 encode/decode.
  • Find and replace — swap specific strings in one step.

There's also a Compare Text feature for spotting differences between two versions of a text, which the site lists as a newer addition.

How to use it

  1. Open textcleanr.com in any browser—it's described as working well on tablets and mobile devices, so no install is needed.
  2. Paste the text you want to fix into the input box.
  3. Set each dropdown to the cleanup you want. For example, to fix text pasted from Word, set MS Word Specific Chars to "Replace Them," Spaces to "Remove Extra Spaces (and Tabs)," and Line Breaks to your preferred option.
  4. If you need a specific substitution, use Find and replace to enter the text to find and its replacement.
  5. Copy the cleaned output and paste it into your destination app.

Verify the result by scanning the output for anything the tool shouldn't have touched—especially if you chose "Remove All Spaces" or "Remove All New Lines," which are aggressive and can merge words or paragraphs. If you're cleaning code or structured text, prefer the narrower options (trim, remove extra spaces) over the blanket removals.

Where it fits—and where it doesn't

TextCleanr is a good fit when you need a quick, no-login formatting fix in the browser: cleaning pasted email threads, normalizing whitespace before publishing, stripping Word artifacts, or doing a one-off Base64 encode. It's less suited to repeatable, scripted cleanup—there's no batch processing or API mentioned—and the aggressive "remove all" options require a careful check afterward.

A practical example: you paste a paragraph from an email reply into a CMS and it arrives full of > indents, double spaces, and curly quotes. Set Email Indents to remove, Spaces to remove extra spaces and tabs, and MS Word Specific Chars to replace—then paste the clean version into the CMS.

Things to know before relying on it

  • The site describes itself as "a work in progress" created by Ryan Jones, so features may change.
  • URL shortening runs through the Tiny.tw API, and the same author also offers a separate URL & Text Shortener tool.
  • No pricing or account requirements are stated on the page; treat availability as-is rather than assuming any paid tier or login.
  • The "doesn't save or store" statement is the site's own claim—still avoid pasting credentials or confidential material into any web tool you don't control.

If your need is a one-off paste cleanup or a quick encode/decode, TextCleanr covers it in a single page. If you need automated, repeatable processing across many files, look for a scriptable alternative instead.