Text Cleaner

Text Cleaner strips HTML tags out of pasted text and swaps the typographic characters a word processor inserts for their plain ASCII equivalents.

One fixed pass does the work: anything between angle brackets is removed, curly single and double quotes become straight ones, en and em dashes become a hyphen, non-breaking spaces become ordinary spaces, and the ends of the block are trimmed. Two things it deliberately leaves alone — HTML entities are not decoded, so a literal   or & stays as those characters, and invisible control characters are not stripped. Tag removal is a bracket match rather than a parser, so a mathematical less-than sign in the prose will swallow the words that follow it until the next closing bracket.

Cleaning is a local string pass. Copy taken off a client site or out of an internal document is not sent anywhere to be processed.

Flattening a paragraph pasted out of Word before it goes into a CMS, taking the markup off a scraped block of copy, straightening quotes so a snippet or a CSV parses, and clearing the hidden non-breaking spaces that pull a layout out of shape.

Also known as: clean text · strip html from text · sanitize text · remove smart quotes