Normalize Text Whitespace: A Developer's Guide to Clean String Input
Normalize whitespace in user input: collapse runs, strip invisible characters, handle Unicode spaces. Patterns for validation and sanitization pipelines.
Published:
Tags: text, developer-tools, programming
Normalize Text Whitespace: From Pasted Mess to Clean Text Text pasted from the real world is rarely clean. A paragraph copied from a PDF arrives with extra spaces between words. A snippet from an email has Windows-style line endings mixed with Unix . A form field contains a non-breaking space that looks correct but fails your equality check. Normalizing whitespace is the process of reducing all this variation to a consistent, predictable format. This guide presents a systematic four-step workflow for whitespace normalization, with implementations in both Python and JavaScript. -----|---------------| | Microsoft Word copy-paste | Non-breaking spaces (), soft hyphens | | PDF copy-paste | Extra spaces between characters, missing spaces between words | | HTML copy-paste | entities, invisible…
All articles · theproductguy.in