Cleaning up text copied from a PDF, email or web page

Text copied out of a PDF breaks every line where the page did; an email reply comes with > on every line; a web page brings odd spaces and curly quotes that break a spreadsheet formula or a command. These tools turn it back into plain, tidy text, in your browser.

1. Fix the shape of the text

Paste it into the Text Cleaner and choose a Recipe that matches where it came from:

Text copied from a PDF rejoins lines into paragraphs and removes doubled spaces.
Email reply to plain text removes the > quoting and rejoins the lines.
Web page to plain text strips leftover tags; Markdown to plain text strips #, * and links.
Plain ASCII turns curly quotes, dashes and accents into plain characters, for systems that can’t take them.

Each recipe is a list of steps you can change: Add a step such as Find and replace or Keep or remove lines that match, untick one you don’t want, and Save as… to keep your own recipe for next time.

2. Change the case

Headings pasted in capitals, names in lower case, a title to turn into a file name: paste it into Case & Style and every version appears at once, each with a Copy button. Sentence case and Capitalise Each Word fix headings, and Code and file names gives kebab-case, snake_case and camelCase for files, URLs and variables.

3. Sort and tidy a list

For a list of names, emails or part numbers, one a line, use Sort Lines. Natural A–Z puts item 2 before item 10, By last word A–Z sorts people by surname, and Oldest first sorts by the dates in the lines. Tick Remove duplicates, Remove blanks and Trim spaces as you go; Ignore case treats Smith and smith as the same.

4. Compare two lists

Who registered but didn’t attend? Which products are on the new price list but not the old? Paste one list as List A and the other as List B in List Compare: you get Only in A, Only in B, In both and In either, once each, each with a Copy button. Tick Ignore capitals for email addresses.

5. Turn it into a table or a page

Rows copied from a spreadsheet, or CSV, become a tidy Markdown table in Markdown Table, for a README, a wiki or a GitHub issue. To move text between formats, the Markup Converter turns HTML (such as an email or a web page’s source) into Markdown, Markdown into clean HTML for a website or newsletter, or either into AsciiDoc or plain text.