Remove Line Breaks

The result updates live, so you can switch modes and compare without pasting again.

1. Copy the text from the PDF, email, ebook or document and paste it into the Input box.
2. Open the Line breaks menu and choose a mode: Replace with a space, Keep paragraph breaks or Join without a space.
3. Read the result in the box labelled Text without line breaks.
4. Press Copy to use it, Download .txt to save it, or Use as input to run another clean-up on the result.

Nothing is uploaded, so contracts, academic papers and private correspondence can be processed without privacy concerns. The same steps work on a phone or tablet.

Here is one sample, a three-line paragraph followed by a blank line and a second two-line paragraph, run through all three modes.

• Replace with a space turns every line break, with any spaces around it, into one space. Blank lines go too, so paragraphs merge. It also trims the ends and squeezes every run of two or more spaces in the text into one.
• Keep paragraph breaks treats a blank line, even one holding only spaces, as a paragraph boundary. Single breaks inside a paragraph become spaces, and several blank lines shrink to one.
• Join without a space removes only the line break characters and touches nothing else. Use it when lines were cut in the middle of a word or a code, and for scripts that do not use spaces between words.

A soft wrap is simply how an editor displays a long line inside its window, and is not stored in the text. A hard return is a real newline character, and that is what causes trouble. PDF files store text as positioned lines, so copying from one inserts a hard return at the end of every visual line. Plain text emails are often wrapped at around 72 characters with real newlines, and OCR output does the same.

After the join, a few things need a look. Words hyphenated across lines, such as docu- and ment, become docu- ment in the space mode and docu-ment in the no-space mode. The hyphen stays, so search for it and fix those words, perhaps with the find and replace tool. Bullet lists, poems, addresses and code lose their structure if you flatten them, and paragraphs marked only by an indented first line will not be detected as paragraphs.

• Researchers and students quoting passages from PDFs and ebooks.
• Editors cleaning manuscripts supplied as hard-wrapped plain text.
• Translators preparing text so that machine translation sees whole sentences rather than fragments.
• Developers flattening a multi-line string, log entry or key into one line. The no-space mode suits tokens that were split across lines.

Once the lines are joined, the whitespace remover clears any remaining irregular spacing, and the text formatting remover strips fancy characters. If the text came from a word processor, the plain text converter keeps its list structure, and the duplicate line remover deals with repeated lines.

As a rule of thumb, pick the mode from the source. A single quotation or an address that must sit on one line suits Replace with a space. A PDF or email with real paragraphs suits Keep paragraph breaks. A key, hash or web address that was wrapped in the middle suits Join without a space. Because the output refreshes immediately, it costs nothing to try each mode on the same text and keep the one that reads correctly.