Remove Extra Spaces

Clean up multiple spaces, tabs & leading/trailing whitespace

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Fix stretched, uneven spacing

Double spaces after periods, tab characters, and stray spaces at the ends of lines are easy to create and hard to spot. They inflate character counts, break exact-match comparisons and look sloppy in published copy. Remove Extra Spaces reduces any run of spaces to one, optionally converts tabs, and trims every line, while keeping your line breaks in place.

Cleaning steps

Paste your text into Input Text, use Paste for the clipboard, or load a .txt file with File. The header counts characters, words and lines.
Decide on two options: Trim each line and Remove tabs. Both are ticked at the start.
Click Remove Extra Spaces.
The summary states how many characters were removed, and Before and After panels compare the counts.
Take the result with Copy or .TXT (cleaned-text.txt). Clear empties the box for the next job.

Order of operations

If Remove tabs is on, each tab becomes a single space first.
Every run of two or more spaces then becomes one space.
If Trim each line is on, leading and trailing spaces on every line are removed.
Finally the whole text is trimmed at both ends.

Who needs this

Editors tidying manuscripts typed with two spaces after each sentence.
Developers and analysts cleaning values before matching them in a spreadsheet or database.
Anyone pasting text from a PDF, where words often come with irregular gaps.
Students checking a word or character limit that is affected by invisible padding.

What it will not do

Blank lines are not removed, so paragraphs stay separated; use a blank-line remover for that. Only the plain space character and tabs are handled, so non-breaking spaces from web pages remain. Be careful with indented content: collapsing spaces flattens indentation in code, tables made of spaces, or ASCII layouts, because any run of spaces shrinks to one. If tabs are meaningful, for example in tab-separated data, untick Remove tabs, although any surrounding runs of spaces are still collapsed. Processing takes place in your browser page, and you can rerun with different settings on the same input.

A quick way to check the effect is to compare the character counts in the Before and After panels: if the difference is larger than you expected, the input probably held long runs of padding, and it is worth skimming the output once before you paste it into a final document.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Will it remove blank lines?

No. Line breaks are kept, including empty lines. The tool only collapses runs of spaces, optionally turns tabs into spaces, and trims the start and end of each line. Use a separate blank-line remover if you also want gaps closed.

What happens to tab characters?

With Remove tabs ticked, each tab is converted to a single space before extra spaces are collapsed. Untick it if your text is tab-separated data and you want the tabs preserved.

Does it affect code indentation?

Yes, it can. Any run of two or more spaces becomes a single space, which flattens indentation. Do not run code, tables built from spaces or ASCII art through it unless you want that result.

Why is a gap still visible after cleaning?

The tool handles regular spaces and tabs. A non-breaking space, often copied from web pages, looks like a space but is a different character, so it stays. Replace those manually if they cause trouble.

What does the removed count show?

The summary reports the difference in total characters between the input and the output. That covers collapsed spaces, converted tabs and trimmed line ends, so it is a character count rather than a count of separate gaps.