The Paper Room

Text Cleaner

Paste text and clean it up with four toggleable cleaning operations: collapse multiple spaces into one, convert smart (curly) quotes to straight quotes, strip non-ASCII characters, and remove control characters. All four are enabled by default — toggle any off to keep that aspect of the text unchanged.

Smart-to-straight quote conversion handles both single and double curly quotes, which is essential when pasting from Word, Google Docs, or macOS which silently replace straight quotes. Non-ASCII removal strips accented characters, symbols, and other non-ASCII codepoints. Control character removal strips invisible characters like null bytes, backspaces, and form feeds that can cause issues in code and data files.

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By The Paper Room Editorial TeamText Tools

Frequently asked questions

What are 'smart quotes'?

Smart quotes (also called curly quotes or typographer's quotes) are the left- and right-facing quotation marks like “ ” and ‘ ’, as opposed to the straight neutral marks " and '. Word processors and macOS auto-convert straight quotes to smart quotes, which can break code, CSV files, and data processing.

Will removing non-ASCII characters strip accented letters?

Yes — characters like é, ñ, ü, and ç are outside the ASCII range and will be removed when that option is enabled. If you need to keep accented characters, toggle that option off.

What are control characters?

Control characters are invisible characters in the 0x00–0x1F and 0x7F–0x9F ranges — null bytes, backspaces, escape sequences, form feeds, and similar. They occasionally appear in text copied from terminals, binary files, or corrupted data and can cause subtle bugs.