Ctrl K

Normalize text

Clean up text copied from Word, a PDF or a website: curly quotes become straight, hard spaces become normal, invisible characters vanish and Unicode is normalised.

Unicode form

How it works

  1. Paste your text

    Type or paste the text in the left box, or open a .txt file. No text to hand? Click Example.

  2. Instant result

    The result appears as you type. Change the options and see straight away what changes.

  3. Copy or download

    Copy the result with one click, save it as a file or use it as input for a next step.

What you can fix

  • Unicode form: NFC (the standard) joins letters and accents into single characters. NFKC goes further and also turns ligatures like fi into fi and ² into 2.
  • Curly quotes to straight ones (“hello” becomes "hello"), plus … to ....
  • Long dashes (– and —) to a plain -. This one is off by default.
  • Invisible characters: zero-width spaces, soft hyphens and byte-order marks are removed, and non-breaking spaces become normal spaces.
  • Extra spaces: doubled spaces and spaces at the end of lines are tidied.

The note lists which fixes actually changed something. This is useful before comparing text, importing it into a database, or when a search doesn't find something that looks identical. For spacing only, use normalize whitespace.

Frequently asked questions

Is the normalize text free?

Yes. The normalize text is completely free, with no account, sign-up or usage limit.

Is my text stored?

No. Your text is processed in your browser and is not sent to a server or stored.

Is there a maximum length?

No, there is no fixed limit. Very long texts can just be a little slower.