Remove line breaks from text
Strip line breaks out of pasted text — great for cleaning up copied PDFs, emails, and code comments.
How it works
Paste text on the left and the cleaned version appears on the right. Choose whether to join lines with a space, remove blank lines, and collapse repeated spaces. Then copy the result.
This pairs well with the other text tools: tidy capitalization with the case converters, flip text with the reverse text tool, or sort and dedupe a list with alphabetize. For everything in one place, use the text transformer.
When you need it
Text copied out of PDFs, emails, code comments and chat logs often arrives with a hard line break at the end of every line, which becomes a mess when you paste it into a document, a spreadsheet cell, or a form field that expects one continuous paragraph. Stripping those breaks — while keeping the real paragraph breaks — turns broken-up text back into clean, flowing prose.
The options, explained
Join with a space replaces each break with a space so words don't run together; remove blank lines collapses the empty gaps left behind; and collapse repeated spaces tidies the double spaces copying often introduces. Combine them to go from a jagged paste to a single clean block in one step, all in your browser.
Why PDF text arrives broken
A PDF has no paragraphs. It stores glyphs at coordinates on a page, and the visual line breaks you see are a consequence of where each piece of text was placed, not of any structure in the document. When you copy, the extractor has to guess where lines end, and it generally inserts a hard break at every visual line — so a justified paragraph becomes a dozen short lines.
The same thing happens with plain-text email, which traditionally hard-wraps at around 72 characters, and with text pulled out of code comments or chat logs. In every case the breaks are an artefact of how the text was displayed, not part of its meaning, which is why removing them restores the original paragraphs.
Hyphenation is the one case to watch. If a PDF broke a word across lines, joining them leaves a stray hyphen mid-word — worth a quick scan afterwards.
Keeping the breaks that matter
The distinction the tool relies on is that a single newline is usually an unwanted wrap while a blank line (two newlines) marks a real paragraph boundary. Joining single breaks and preserving doubles therefore reconstructs the paragraphing correctly most of the time.
- Turn off "remove blank lines" to keep paragraph separation intact.
- "Join with a space" is what you want for prose; joining with nothing is for reassembling a value that was split mid-string, such as a long token or a base64 blob.
- "Collapse repeated spaces" cleans up the double spaces that appear where justified text was extracted.
Text that was never prose — a list, a code block, a table — should keep its breaks, since each line is meaningful there. Run those through the alphabetize tool or the CSV converter instead.
The invisible characters that cause trouble
Line endings differ by platform: Windows uses a carriage return plus line feed (CRLF), Unix and macOS use a bare line feed (LF). Mixed endings in one file are common when text has passed between systems, and they cause odd behaviour in editors and version control even though nothing looks wrong on screen.
Text copied from the web can also carry non-breaking spaces (U+00A0) that look exactly like ordinary spaces but do not wrap and do not match a normal space in a search — a frequent cause of a find-and-replace mysteriously failing. Cleaning text through this tool normalises the obvious whitespace problems; for case and other transformations, the text transformer handles the rest.