What invisible characters does it fix?

It converts non-breaking spaces (U+00A0), narrow and thin spaces, ideographic spaces, and zero-width spaces and joiners into ordinary ASCII spaces or removes them. These often sneak in from PDFs, word processors, and pasted web content.

What is a zero-width space?

A zero-width space (U+200B) and its relatives take up no visible room but still count as characters. They break search, sorting, and equality checks, so this tool removes them entirely rather than turning them into visible spaces.

Does it change line breaks?

It preserves line breaks but can collapse runs of three or more blank lines down to one, and trims trailing spaces at the end of each line. Spaces and tabs within a line are collapsed to single spaces when that option is on.

Why does normalised text matter?

Inconsistent whitespace causes duplicate-looking entries, failed string matches, and broken layouts. Normalising to plain single ASCII spaces makes text comparable, searchable, and clean for storage or display.

Whitespace Normaliser

Pasted text often carries invisible baggage: non-breaking spaces from PDFs, zero-width characters from web pages, double spaces, and trailing whitespace. This tool normalises all of it to clean, predictable ASCII spacing.

How it works

The cleaner applies a sequence of substitutions:

1. Remove zero-width chars: U+200B, U+200C, U+200D, U+FEFF
2. Map exotic spaces to a plain space:
   U+00A0 (NBSP), U+2007, U+202F, U+2009, U+3000 …
3. Replace tabs with a space
4. Collapse runs of spaces to one (optional)
5. Trim leading/trailing whitespace per line (optional)
6. Collapse 3+ blank lines to a single blank line

The result uses only ordinary U+0020 spaces and newlines, so the text becomes consistent and safe to compare or store.

Example and tips

A heading copied from a slide deck that reads Quarterly Report with a hidden non-breaking space and trailing spaces becomes a clean Quarterly Report. If two strings look identical but fail an equality check, run both through here first — an invisible zero-width character is the usual culprit.