When pasted text needs a wash
- Text pasted from Word into a CMS or email editor arrives carrying fonts and line-height that fight your layout.
- A value pasted into a form has invisible whitespace around it, so comparisons never match.
- Letters and digits copied from a web page are fullwidth, and the database lookup finds nothing.
- A document has to go into code or a config file, where hidden control characters cannot follow it.
- A long draft is full of stray blank lines and you want one consistent paragraph spacing in a single pass.
What this tool does
Paste or type text on the left, and the cleaned-up version appears on the right instantly. Copying from a Word document or a webpage usually puts both plain text and a styled HTML version — full of fonts, colors and line-height rules — onto the clipboard. When you paste into this tool's input box, it checks the clipboard for that HTML version first and, if present, converts it to plain text using paragraph and line-break boundaries — instead of relying on the browser's default paste behavior, which often squashes an entire document onto a single line. When this happens, a note appears: "Detected formatted content in the clipboard — converted to plain text."
Four cleaning steps
| Step | What it handles | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Strip leftover HTML tags and comments | Literal tags like <span> or <div> that show up as text, plus Word's <!--[if gte mso 9]> conditional comment blocks. | <p>Hi</p> becomes Hi |
| Fullwidth to halfwidth | Latin letters, digits and punctuation in the Unicode Fullwidth Forms block (U+FF01–FF5E), plus the fullwidth space, converted to their halfwidth equivalents. | Ａｂｃ，１２３！ becomes Abc,123! |
| Remove hidden characters | Zero-width spaces, byte-order marks (BOM), bidirectional control characters, soft hyphens, and other C0 control characters; a non-breaking space (NBSP) is visible but behaves like a space bar, so it is normalized to a regular space instead of deleted. | Text copied from webpages often carries these — invisible even after pasting. |
| Collapse extra blank lines | Trailing whitespace is trimmed from every line, and three or more consecutive blank lines collapse to one. | Four blank lines become one; leading indentation is left untouched. |
All four steps are on by default and each has its own checkbox — turning some off does not affect the others. For example, to keep intentional fullwidth punctuation in a Chinese document, just turn off "Fullwidth to halfwidth."
Does fullwidth-to-halfwidth touch normal Chinese punctuation
Partly. The U+FF01–FF5E block used for the conversion includes the fullwidth comma ， and fullwidth parentheses （）, so turning this step on converts them to halfwidth , and (); but the Chinese period 。 and enumeration comma 、 live in a different Unicode block (CJK Symbols and Punctuation) and are left alone. If your text is formal Chinese copy that intentionally uses fullwidth commas and parentheses, turn off this one step — the other three are unaffected.
Does anything you type leave the browser
No. Reading the clipboard, converting HTML, and every cleaning step all run in your browser, and nothing you paste is uploaded anywhere. That is true of every tool on this site — see the privacy policy for the details.
Frequently asked questions
- Can I clean just one kind of mess and leave the rest?
- Yes. Each of the four steps has its own checkbox — turn off the ones you don't want, and the result recomputes instantly.
- The pasted text already looks plain — does the strip-HTML-tags step still do anything?
- Yes. When the clipboard carries formatted content, the tool already converts it to plain text on paste, so tags are usually gone by then. But for manually typed text, or text that is itself literal HTML source copied from a code viewer, this step removes leftover tag characters with a text match.
- What does "nothing matched the selected cleaning steps" mean?
- It means none of the currently enabled steps found anything to change in this text — the text was already clean, not that the tool failed to run.
- Is there a size limit on the pasted text?
- Only what your browser tab's memory allows. Very long documents will feel sluggish since everything recleans live as you type.