Whitespace & Trim Tools

Extra whitespace — at line edges, doubled up inside text, blank lines, mixed tabs and spaces — is rarely visible at a glance, but it often breaks string comparisons, parsing, or how code looks. This tool cleans up such issues with a set of targeted operations.

How to use it

• Trim: strip whitespace from the start and end of every line.
• Collapse: replace several consecutive spaces or blank lines with a single one.
• Tabs ↔ spaces: convert in either direction with a chosen number of spaces per tab.

Common uses

• Cleaning up text copied from a PDF or Word document, which often leaves extra spaces and invisible characters behind.
• Normalizing code indentation to one consistent style (spaces only or tabs only) before a commit.
• Debugging why two visually identical lines aren't equal when compared — often the cause is a hidden extra space or a non-breaking space.

Things to keep in mind

A non-breaking space ( , code point U+00A0) looks like a regular space but is a different character to a computer — strings containing it aren't equal to a regular space in comparisons.

Trimming line-edge whitespace doesn't touch spaces inside words or sentences — collapsing repeated internal spaces is a separate operation.