Whitespace Cleaner

Strip extra whitespace from any text. Trim each line, collapse consecutive spaces or blank lines, normalize tabs/spaces, remove zero-width characters. Useful when text comes back from a system that mangled the spacing — copy from PDF, paste from Word, output from a code generator.

Why whitespace bugs are sneaky

Whitespace is invisible but semantically loaded. Trailing spaces in a config break some parsers. Mixed tabs/spaces break Python. Zero-width characters confuse search. Two consecutive spaces look like one but compare unequal.

This tool surfaces those issues and cleans them in one pass.

Cleaning options

• Trim trailing whitespace per line (the most common cleanup)
• Trim leading whitespace per line (off by default — preserves indent)
• Collapse multiple spaces to one
• Collapse multiple blank lines to one (or remove all blanks)
• Tabs → N spaces with configurable width
• Spaces → tabs for languages that prefer tabs
• Strip zero-width chars (ZWSP, ZWNJ, ZWJ, BOM)
• Strip non-breaking spaces (U+00A0) → regular space

Common workflows

Clean a PDF copy-paste. PDF text comes with weird character widths and zero-widths. Run through, get clean ASCII.

Normalize a config file. A teammate’s editor saved tabs; your linter wants spaces. Convert.

Fix a hidden ZWSP. A search returns no matches even though the string is visibly there. Strip zero-widths to normalize.

Prepare for diff. Two configs that look identical but diff dirty. Strip whitespace from both, diff again, see real changes.

Last updated: 2025-01-15