Plain Text Cleaner
Paste text into the box below and the cleaned result appears underneath automatically: no smart quotes, no curly dashes, no invisible characters hiding in the middle of it. Everything happens in your browser, and the full result is always visible, no scrolling required.
Paste Anything
Paste text from anywhere, Word, Google Docs, a PDF, a chat app, and the cleaned result appears below automatically as you paste or type. Nothing to click.
A Brief History of the Smart Quote
Straight quotes (' and ") are what typewriters produced and what ASCII defined: simple, unambiguous, and easy for software to parse. When word processors like WordStar and early Word arrived, they started auto-converting those straight marks into "curly" typographic quotes, borrowed from centuries of print typesetting, because they looked better on the page. That auto-correct habit stuck around long after most writing moved from paper to plain text files, code editors, and web forms, none of which expect anything but the plain ASCII version. The result is a small, recurring headache: a smart quote pasted into JSON breaks the parser, a curly apostrophe in a CSV file shifts a column, and a mismatched encoding turns either into unreadable garbage. This tool exists to undo that, converting the typography back into the plain characters most software was actually built to expect.
Common Plain Text Cleaner Questions
What does this tool actually change in my text?
It converts curly or smart quotes and apostrophes to straight ones, em and en dashes to a plain hyphen, the ellipsis character to three periods, and unusual spacing characters to a normal space. It also strips invisible characters like zero-width spaces and byte order marks, and stray control characters that sometimes survive a paste. Regular line breaks, letters, numbers, and punctuation are left alone.
Does this remove bold, italics, or other formatting?
There's nothing left to remove by the time you paste. A plain text box like this one can only ever hold plain text, browsers strip bold, italics, fonts, colors, and every other bit of rich formatting the instant something's pasted in. What's left afterward are characters that look like normal punctuation but aren't, smart quotes, odd dashes, invisible spacing, and this tool cleans those up.
Why do smart quotes and dashes cause problems?
They're not the plain ASCII characters most software expects. Paste a curly quote into code, a CSV file, or certain older web forms, and it can throw a syntax error, break a search, or show up as garbled characters when the encoding doesn't match. Straight quotes and plain hyphens are the safe, universal fallback.
What are the "invisible characters" you mention?
Characters like zero-width spaces and byte order marks that carry no visible shape but are still there in the text, often left behind by copying from web pages, PDFs, or certain editors. They don't show up when you look at the text, but they can break word counts, search matches, and scripts that process the text later.
Is my text sent anywhere when I paste it here?
No. Everything happens directly in your browser with plain JavaScript, nothing you paste or type is ever sent to a server.