Text Cleaner
Clean up text copied from Word, PDFs, Google Docs, and the web. Convert curly smart quotes to straight quotes, turn em and en dashes into hyphens, replace the ellipsis character with three dots, fix garbled mojibake characters, strip accents and diacritics, remove emoji, and tidy spacing — all in one click.
ToolsSoup's Text Cleaner is a free online tool that fixes the messy formatting you get when you copy text from Microsoft Word, PDFs, Google Docs, emails, or the web. In one click it converts curly smart quotes and apostrophes into plain straight quotes, swaps fancy em and en dashes for ordinary hyphens, replaces the single ellipsis character with three dots, and repairs garbled mojibake characters left behind by broken encoding. It can also strip accents and diacritics, remove emoji, and tidy up stray spacing. The cleaned, plain-text result appears beside your input with a before-and-after character count, ready to paste anywhere. Everything runs in your browser — no uploads, no sign-up, and your text never leaves your device.
What does a text cleaner do?
A text cleaner takes text that was copied from a formatted source — Word, a PDF, a web page, a chat app — and turns it back into clean, plain text. Rich editors quietly insert special typographic characters: curly opening and closing quotes, long em dashes, en dashes, and a single-character ellipsis. When that text lands in code, a CSV, a CMS field, a terminal, or a system that expects plain ASCII, those characters break searches, comparisons, and imports. This tool replaces them with their plain equivalents, repairs encoding artifacts known as mojibake, and optionally removes accents and emoji so what you paste is exactly what you see.
How to clean copied text
Fixing pasted text with ToolsSoup takes only a few seconds:
- Paste the text you copied from Word, a PDF, or a website into the text box.
- Choose what to clean — smart quotes, dashes, the ellipsis character, mojibake, spacing, and optionally accents or emoji.
- Click Clean text, check the before and after character counts, then click Copy result to grab your clean plain text.
Why does pasted text contain weird characters?
Word processors and web pages use typographic characters to look polished: curly quotes instead of straight ones, em dashes instead of hyphens, and a compact ellipsis instead of three periods. Copy that text into a plain-text field and those characters travel with it. Worse, when text is decoded with the wrong character set you get mojibake — sequences such as a stray A-with-circumflex before a space, or odd letter combinations where an accented letter or a curly quote should be. This tool recognizes those patterns and restores the intended characters.
Text cleaner vs. whitespace remover
These tools tackle different kinds of mess. A whitespace remover works at the spacing level — collapsing double spaces, trimming line ends, and stripping invisible space characters. The text cleaner focuses on the characters themselves: curly quotes, fancy dashes, the ellipsis character, mojibake, accents, and emoji. The text cleaner also tidies basic spacing as a convenience, but if your only problem is extra spaces and tabs, the whitespace remover is the more targeted choice. Use the text cleaner whenever copied text looks slightly off or refuses to behave in plain-text fields.
Why use this text cleaner?
- Convert curly smart quotes and apostrophes into plain straight quotes.
- Turn em dashes and en dashes into ordinary hyphens.
- Replace the single ellipsis character with three plain dots.
- Fix garbled mojibake characters caused by broken text encoding.
- Optionally strip accents and diacritics and remove emoji.
- Collapse extra spaces and trim line ends for clean, even text.
- See a before-and-after character count, with the result ready to copy.
- Runs entirely in your browser — your text is never uploaded.
Frequently asked questions
How do I remove formatting from text copied out of Word?
Paste the text into the box and click Clean text. The tool converts Word's curly quotes to straight quotes, its em and en dashes to hyphens, and its ellipsis character to three dots, then tidies spacing — leaving clean plain text you can paste anywhere.
What is mojibake and can this fix it?
Mojibake is the garbled text you get when characters are decoded with the wrong character set — for example an accented letter or a curly quote showing up as a strange pair of symbols. Turn on Fix garbled characters and the tool replaces the common broken sequences with the characters they were meant to be.
How is this different from a whitespace remover?
A whitespace remover works on spacing — extra spaces, tabs, and invisible characters. This text cleaner works on the characters themselves: smart quotes, fancy dashes, the ellipsis character, mojibake, accents, and emoji. It also tidies basic spacing, but for spacing-only cleanup the whitespace remover is more focused.
Will it remove accents from names and words?
Only if you want it to. Strip accents and diacritics is off by default; turn it on to convert letters like café to cafe and naïve to naive. Leave it off to keep accented characters intact while still fixing quotes, dashes, and mojibake.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. The text cleaner runs entirely in your browser. Your text is never sent to a server, so you can safely clean private or sensitive content.