Text Cleaner Remove formatting & clean text Lorem Ipsum Generate placeholder text Word Count Count words, chars & reading time Dedupe Lines Remove repeated lines instantly Sort Lines Sort lines A–Z or shuffle Find & Replace Search & replace in bulk
0 Characters
0 Words
0 Lines
0 Sentences
Input — paste your text here
Output — cleaned result

What is a Text Cleaner?

A text cleaner strips the hidden formatting that rides along when you copy text — bold, italic, underline, font colors and sizes, embedded hyperlinks, list markup, and table structure — and hands back clean plain text. When you paste from Word, Google Docs, a PDF, an email, or a web page into a CMS, an email builder, or a code file, that inherited styling normally breaks your layout. This tool removes it in one step.

Beyond stripping rich text, the Text Cleaner above gives you individual toggles for the things plain "paste as text" can't touch: collapse extra spaces and blank lines, strip raw HTML tags, remove line breaks, drop numbers, punctuation, emojis, or special symbols, dedupe lines, sort lines, and switch case (UPPER, lower, Title, Sentence, camelCase, snake_case, kebab-case). The output updates live, so you choose exactly what gets removed before you copy.

How to Remove Text Formatting — Step by Step

  1. Paste your formatted text into the Input box above. Copy from Word, Google Docs, email, a PDF, a webpage — anywhere. The tool accepts any text with any level of formatting.
  2. Select your cleaning options in the left panel. Toggle on what you need: remove extra spaces, strip HTML tags, remove line breaks, convert case, remove punctuation, duplicates, numbers, or emojis. The output updates live as you change settings.
  3. Click "Copy output" and paste the clean plain text wherever you need it — CMS, email client, code editor, database field, or any other destination.

You may already know the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+V (Cmd+Shift+V on Mac) for "paste without formatting." That works in many apps but has two limitations: it relies on the destination app supporting the shortcut, and it gives you zero control over what exactly gets cleaned. CleanTextFree lets you choose precisely what to remove — keep your line breaks but strip HTML, or keep bold but remove colors — before you paste.

Before and After Examples

Source Before (formatted) After (plain text)
Microsoft Word Text with bold headings, colored highlights, custom fonts, and list bullets pasted as HTML markup Plain paragraphs with no styling — ready to paste into WordPress, Ghost, or any CMS
Google Docs Rich text with italic and underline styles, table formatting, and embedded hyperlinks Clean text with only the words — no invisible link markup or style overrides
Email (Gmail / Outlook) HTML email content with font-family declarations, color attributes, and inline CSS Plain readable text with proper spacing — safe to paste into any plain-text email template
Website / Blog Copied article text includes <p>, <strong>, <em> tags and &nbsp; characters Strip HTML tags option removes all tags — only the readable text remains
PDF document Extracted text often contains extra line breaks, hyphenated words split across lines, and extra spaces Remove extra spaces + extra blank lines + trim each line = clean readable paragraphs

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Frequently Asked Questions

How do I remove the formatting from text copied out of Word or Google Docs?

Paste it straight into the Input box above. A plain textarea drops most rich-text styling on the way in, and the default toggles — remove extra spaces, remove extra blank lines, trim each line — tidy up the spacing that Word and Google Docs leave behind. If you copied the underlying HTML rather than the rendered text (for example from "view source" or a CMS field), switch on "Strip HTML tags" to pull out the <p>, <span>, and style markup too. Then click Copy output.

Can it remove emojis and special characters?

Yes. "Remove emojis" clears emoji and pictographs, and "Remove special symbols" strips bullet characters (•, ‣, ⁃), dingbats, and box-drawing glyphs that often come from pasted lists. There are separate toggles for "Remove numbers" and "Remove punctuation" if you also want digits or marks like commas and dashes gone. Each is independent, so you can target only what you want removed.

What is the difference between this and Ctrl+Shift+V?

Ctrl+Shift+V (Cmd+Shift+V on Mac) is "paste without formatting" and works in many apps — but it is all-or-nothing and depends on the destination app supporting it. This Text Cleaner lets you pick exactly what to remove: keep line breaks but strip HTML, keep words but drop punctuation, or any combination. You also see a live preview of the result before you copy it.

Can I choose what gets removed and what stays?

Yes — that control is the whole point. Every cleaning option in the left panel is an independent toggle, so you turn on only what you need. Enable "Strip HTML tags" and "Remove extra spaces" while leaving everything else off, for instance, and the output updates instantly so you can check the result before copying.