How to Clean Up Messy Text, Lists and Capital Letters
Updated 18 October 2026 · 6 min read
Fix text copied from PDFs and websites, remove duplicate lines, sort lists, change capitals without retyping, and reverse the order of lines.
Text rarely arrives tidy. Copying from a PDF breaks every line, a web page brings stray spaces, two exported mailing lists overlap, and someone typed a whole paragraph with Caps Lock on. A few small tools fix all of this without retyping anything.
Fix text copied from a PDF or web page
Paste it into the Text Cleaner and choose what to fix:
| Option | Use it when |
|---|---|
| Trim extra spaces | There are double spaces, tabs or spaces at the ends of lines |
| Collapse blank lines | There are piles of empty lines between paragraphs |
| Remove all line breaks | A copied paragraph has a hard break at the end of every line |
| Remove non-printable characters | A form, formula or import fails for no visible reason |
Copying several paragraphs from a PDF? Clean and copy them one at a time with Remove all line breaks, so the breaks between paragraphs survive.
Remove duplicates from a list
Put one item per line, for example a column copied from a spreadsheet, and paste it into Remove Duplicate Lines. It keeps the first copy of each line in the original order and tells you how many repeats it removed.
- Turn off case-sensitive matching for email addresses, usernames and tags, so “John@Example.com” and “john@example.com” count as the same.
- If obvious duplicates survive, the lines probably differ by a trailing space. Run the list through the Text Cleaner with Trim extra spaces first.
Sort a list
Sort Text Lines sorts A → Z, Z → A or by number.
- Alphabetical order puts “10” before “2”, because it compares characters. Use Numeric for lists of IDs, prices or scores.
- Sorting ignores capital letters by default and follows your language's rules for accented letters.
- Blank lines are dropped and duplicates are kept, so remove duplicates first if you need a clean list.
Change capital letters without retyping
The Case Converter turns text into UPPERCASE, lowercase, Title Case, Sentence case or camelCase. Use Sentence case to fix a paragraph typed with Caps Lock on.
- Title Case capitalises every word. Style guides keep short words like “and” and “of” lowercase, so adjust those by hand.
- Sentence case lowercases everything except the start of each sentence, so names and acronyms such as London or NASA need fixing afterwards.
- Need just one style as you type? Use UPPERCASE for block-capital forms and codes, or lowercase for tags and file names.
- Lowercasing cannot be undone automatically, and passwords are case-sensitive, so never change the case of a password or key.
Flip the order
Reverse Text reverses characters, words or lines. Reversing lines turns an oldest-first log or chat export into newest-first. Character reversal can split vowel signs in scripts such as Devanagari, but word and line reversal work with any language.
A reliable order for messy lists
- Clean spaces and invisible characters with the Text Cleaner.
- Fix capitals if the list mixes styles.
- Remove duplicates.
- Sort, then copy the result back.
Everything runs in your browser, so customer lists, emails and other personal data are never uploaded.