Text Cleaner
Transform messy, disorganized text into clean, structured content. Remove duplicate lines, strip empty lines, eliminate HTML tags, normalize whitespace, and sort alphabetically. The composable cleaning pipeline lets you apply any combination of operations in a single pass. Essential for data cleaning, log analysis, list deduplication, and content preparation.
What does this tool do?
The Text Cleaner applies multiple cleaning operations to transform disorganized text into usable formats. It can remove duplicate lines (keeping the first occurrence), delete empty lines, trim leading and trailing whitespace from each line, collapse multiple consecutive spaces into single spaces, strip HTML/XML tags entirely, and sort lines alphabetically (with optional reverse order). Operations are applied in a fixed sequence for predictable results, and you can toggle each operation individually to customize your cleaning pipeline.
How it works
The tool processes text through a configurable pipeline of transformation functions. First, HTML tags are removed using regex pattern matching if that option is enabled. Then each line is trimmed of leading and trailing whitespace. Multiple consecutive spaces are collapsed to single spaces. Empty lines are filtered out if selected. Duplicate lines are deduplicated based on exact string matching (case-sensitive). Finally, if sorting is enabled, lines are sorted using JavaScript's locale-aware string comparison. The fixed processing order ensures consistent, predictable results regardless of which options are selected.
Features
- Remove duplicate lines (keeps first occurrence)
- Remove empty lines
- Trim whitespace from start and end of each line
- Collapse multiple spaces into single spaces
- Strip HTML and XML tags
- Sort lines alphabetically (ascending or descending)
- Composable pipeline — mix any operations
How to use
- 1
Paste your messy text
Enter text needing cleanup — survey responses, log files, data exports, web-scraped content, copy-pasted lists, or any disorganized text.
- 2
Select cleaning operations
Toggle the operations you need. Common combinations: dedupe + sort for unique sorted lists; strip HTML + trim for web content; remove empty + dedupe for data cleaning.
- 3
Review the result
The cleaned output appears instantly. The fixed processing order is: strip HTML → trim → collapse spaces → remove empty → dedupe → sort.
- 4
Copy cleaned text
Click Copy to copy the result to clipboard. Paste into your spreadsheet, database, code editor, or document.
Common use cases
Data deduplication
Remove duplicate entries from email lists, customer databases, exported data, and contact lists before importing to CRM or marketing systems.
Log file analysis
Clean server logs and application logs by removing duplicates, stripping timestamps if needed, and sorting for pattern analysis.
Web content extraction
Strip HTML tags from scraped or copied web content, normalize whitespace, and prepare clean text for republishing or analysis.
Survey data cleaning
Clean up messy survey responses with extra spaces, blank entries, and duplicate submissions before analysis.
Tips & best practices
- Duplicate detection is case-sensitive: 'Apple' and 'apple' are different. Use the Case Converter first if you need case-insensitive deduplication
- Processing order matters: HTML is stripped first so <p> tags don't become empty lines that then need removal
- For CSV data, be careful with the collapse-spaces option — it may alter field formatting if spaces are meaningful
- Combine with Word Counter to analyze cleaned data and see the reduction in line count and character count