Clean Pasted Text: Remove Formatting and Hidden Characters
How to clean text pasted from Word, PDFs, and web pages. Remove smart quotes, invisible Unicode, extra spaces, and rich-text formatting with free tools.
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Tags: text, developer-tools, productivity
Clean Pasted Text: Remove Hidden Characters and Formatting When you paste text from a word processor, PDF, email, or web page into a plain text editor or form, invisible characters come along for the ride. Smart quotes, em dashes, non-breaking spaces, soft hyphens, zero-width characters, and even document metadata hide in the pasted text. These characters look innocent but cause database errors, break string comparisons, corrupt exported CSV files, and occasionally cause rendering bugs. This guide identifies the most common hidden characters and shows how to detect and remove them programmatically. --- The Usual Suspects Smart Quotes (Curly Quotes) Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, and macOS auto-correct turn straight quotes into typographic quotes: | Character | Unicode | Name | Original |…
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