Clean pasted text. See what was hiding in it.
PasteCleaner strips invisible Unicode characters, smart quotes, em dashes, and other formatting gremlins from text you paste out of Word, Google Docs, PDFs, email, or AI chats — and flags every single one so you can see what was there.
What it catches
Zero-width characters U+200B…
Invisible spaces and joiners that break search, dedupe, diffs, and string matching — flagged and stripped.
Smart quotes “ ” ‘ ’
Curly quotes and apostrophes from Word and Google Docs become straight quotes that code, JSON, and CSVs expect.
Em & en dashes — –
Replace with a hyphen, a comma, or nothing — your choice. Hyphen lookalikes and minus signs are unified too.
Sneaky spaces NBSP…
Non-breaking, narrow, thin, and ideographic spaces all become a plain space, so columns align and parsers behave.
Direction marks RLO, LRM
Bidirectional control characters used in “trojan source” tricks are surfaced and removed.
Encoding junk �
Stray control characters, byte-order marks, and replacement characters from bad copy-paste round-trips.
How it works
1. Paste
Drop in text from anywhere — documents, PDFs, spreadsheets, email, chat apps, AI assistants.
2. See the findings
Every hidden or non-standard character is flagged inline with a label — hover any chip for its Unicode codepoint and what it becomes.
3. Copy clean text
Grab the normalized result, download it, or batch-clean whole files with Pro. Nothing ever leaves your browser.
Questions, answered
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. PasteCleaner runs entirely in your browser with client-side JavaScript. Your text is never sent to a server, stored, or logged — you can even load the page and then go offline.
What are invisible Unicode characters?
Characters like the zero-width space (U+200B), byte order mark (U+FEFF), and soft hyphen (U+00AD) that render as nothing but still live in the string. They break search, comparisons, spreadssheet lookups, and code — PasteCleaner reveals and removes them.
Will it break my emoji?
No. With 'Protect emoji' on (the default), sequences built with zero-width joiners and variation selectors — like family emoji and ❤️ — pass through untouched, while the same characters hiding between normal letters are removed.
Is it safe for code?
Yes — pick the Code-safe preset. It removes only invisible and dangerous characters and leaves quotes, dashes, and spacing exactly as written, so string literals and syntax are untouched.
What does Pro add?
A one-time $5 unlock adds batch file cleaning (drop up to 200 .txt/.md/.csv files, get a cleaned zip back) and unlimited saved custom presets. The core cleaner is free forever.
All tools
Same engine, tuned starting points: