Whitespace Remover

Whitespace problems are some of the most common and most invisible issues in pasted or copied text. Text copied out of a PDF, an old email thread, a spreadsheet cell, or a legacy system export frequently carries trailing spaces at the end of lines, tabs mixed with spaces, doubled-up spaces where a line was edited and re-typed over itself, and stray blank lines left behind by inconsistent formatting. None of this is visible to the eye in a normal text field — a trailing space looks identical to no trailing space until you paste the text somewhere that treats whitespace meaningfully, like a CSV column, a config file, or a string comparison that unexpectedly fails. This tool separates whitespace cleanup into four independent operations rather than one blunt "clean it all up" button, because different situations call for different combinations. Trimming leading/trailing whitespace on each line removes exactly what its name says — spaces or tabs at the very start or end of each line — without touching whitespace in the middle of a line, which matters if a line's internal spacing (like column alignment in a plain-text table) is meaningful and should be preserved. Collapsing multiple spaces/tabs into one addresses the doubled-space or mixed-tab-and-space problem within a line, replacing any run of consecutive spaces or tabs with a single space, which is exactly what you want for prose where extra internal whitespace serves no purpose but is visually distracting and can break certain parsers that expect single-space-separated tokens. Removing blank/empty lines entirely drops any line that is empty after trimming, which is useful for cleaning up a list or code snippet that has accumulated stray blank lines from repeated copy-pasting or editing. These first three options are independent checkboxes and combine freely — you might want to trim lines and collapse spaces but keep blank lines as paragraph breaks, or remove blank lines but leave internal spacing untouched. All default to checked, since trimming, collapsing and blank-line removal together represent the most common "just clean this up" request and produce a sensible, non-destructive result for the overwhelming majority of pasted text. The fourth option, remove all whitespace entirely, is fundamentally different in kind rather than degree: it is not "more aggressive trimming," it strips every space, tab, newline and other whitespace character from the entire text, collapsing it into one unbroken string with no whitespace anywhere at all — including between words that were never meant to run together. This is occasionally exactly what's needed (checking whether two strings are equal ignoring all whitespace differences, or generating a whitespace-free identifier from a phrase), but it is a fundamentally destructive, all-or-nothing transformation incompatible with any notion of "clean up the formatting while keeping it readable." Because of that, checking this option deliberately overrides and disables the other three — there is no meaningful way to combine "strip literally everything" with "but also trim each line first" — so the interface visually greys out and ignores the other three checkboxes whenever this one is active, making the mutual exclusivity explicit rather than leaving you to wonder why your other settings stopped having any visible effect. The before/after character count (using Unicode-code-point-safe counting, consistent with the rest of this tool suite) makes the effect of your chosen options immediately quantifiable, which is a useful sanity check before pasting cleaned text into a size-constrained field or committing it somewhere.