I'm worried cleaning will ruin my original product description; can I undo it?
Yes, and usually you will not even need to: the whitespace cleaner never touches your original text unless you press 'Apply to input'. Before that you see the result in the preview box, with the number of changes each rule would make shown beside it. If you apply and change your mind, the 'Undo' button brings the previous text back as it was.
Three layers of safety
- The preview: the result appears in a separate read-only box, and your text in the input box does not change.
- The counters: each rule shows how many changes it would make, so an unexpected number tells you where to look before anything changes.
- Undo: after 'Apply to input', an 'Undo' button appears that restores the text from before you applied.
Example: a two-line description
The original: 'Authentic Arabic coffee' with two spaces at the start, three spaces between 'Authentic' and 'Arabic' and two at the end, then 'Medium roast'.
The preview shows 3 changes: the start of one line trimmed, the end of one line trimmed and one run of spaces collapsed. The preview text reads 'Authentic Arabic coffee' then 'Medium roast'.
Comparing original and result in the text comparison tool: one modified line and one unchanged. With whitespace differences ignored the comparison says the texts are identical, so cleaning changed nothing but spaces.
A careful way to work
- Paste the description into the Whitespace cleaner and check the counters and preview.
- For proof, copy the original and the result into Text comparison and tick 'Ignore whitespace differences'. The identical message means no word changed.
- Copy the result straight from 'Copy result', or press 'Apply to input' if you want to keep cleaning with other rules.
The one catch with Undo
Undo keeps a single copy: the text from before your last apply. If you type or paste anything into the input box after applying, the button disappears and that copy is gone, because the text is now a new text. The same happens if you press Clear or Load example. So if you are unsure, copy the result from the preview instead of applying, and leave the original where it is.
No undo replaces a backup. Before cleaning a long description you wrote with care, keep a copy somewhere else, in your store dashboard or a file.
What cleaning never touches, whatever you tick
- Letters, words, punctuation and Arabic diacritics.
- Invisible direction marks and soft hyphens.
- The zero-width non-joiner and joiner (ZWNJ and ZWJ), unless you turn on their rule, which is off by default and shows a warning when on.
All of this runs inside your browser, so the description is never uploaded to a server while you preview or apply.
Common questions
Can I undo more than one step?
No, Undo restores the text from before the last apply only.
Does my text change when I change the rules?
No, only the preview and the counters change.
Does the tool keep my text if I close the page?
No, nothing is saved, so copy the result before closing.