Whitespace cleaner: questions and guides
Each guide here answers one question with a practical example, then takes you to the tool to try it yourself. Guides: 9.
Questions
- How to remove extra spaces from textHow to clean text copied from Word, a PDF or a spreadsheet of repeated spaces, blank lines and hidden special spaces, with a preview before anything changes.
- A product name looks identical in two files but Excel won't match them in a lookup; could a hidden space be the cause?Often yes: a non-breaking space copied from a web page or Word looks like a normal space but is a different character. The special-spaces rule replaces it and counts it.
- How do I remove invisible zero-width characters from text I copied from a website?Turn on 'Remove zero-width separators' to delete ZWSP, word joiner and BOM. The rule is off by default and kept apart from ZWNJ and ZWJ for a good reason.
- I copied the product and price columns from Excel into a WhatsApp message and got big uneven gaps; how do I fix that?Excel separates columns with a tab, and chat apps show it as a wide gap. Convert tabs to spaces with space collapsing on, and each tab becomes a single space.
- The system I'm uploading to wants Windows line endings; which option do I choose when downloading?Choose CRLF under 'Line endings for copy and download' and the file gets Windows line breaks, with existing CRLF pairs never doubled. Why it stays LF otherwise.
- My product list indents sub-items; how do I clean double spaces without losing that indentation?Untick 'Trim whitespace at the start of each line'. Collapsing never touches leading spaces, so indented sub-items stay indented while double spaces between words go.
- I'm worried cleaning will ruin my original product description; can I undo it?Your text only changes when you press 'Apply to input'; first you see a preview and a count per rule. After applying, 'Undo' brings the old text back, with one catch.
- How can I see which spaces, tabs and hidden characters are in my text before I clean it?Turn on 'Show invisible characters in the preview': a space shows as a dot, a tab as an arrow, a non-breaking space as ⍽ and a line end as ¶. Marks are never copied.
- Why isn't Word's find-and-replace of two spaces with one enough to clean my text?Find and replace needs repeating for runs of three or more, and it misses non-breaking spaces and line-edge spaces. The whitespace cleaner handles each case in one pass.