Remove Line Breaks

What This Tool Does

This tool removes unwanted line breaks from your text. Paste messy text from PDFs, emails, or documents, and get clean, properly formatted output.

Four cleaning options available:

• Remove All - Eliminates every line break, creating one continuous block of text
• Single Only - Removes single line breaks but keeps paragraph breaks (double line breaks)
• Replace with Space - Converts line breaks to spaces, preventing words from joining
• Remove Extra - Reduces multiple consecutive line breaks to maximum two (keeps paragraph structure)

Additional options let you trim extra spaces and clean up the start and end of your text.

Why Text Gets Messy Line Breaks

Line breaks appear where you don't want them for several common reasons:

Copy-Pasting from PDFs

PDFs are built for printing, not text editing. When you copy text from a PDF, the line breaks from the printed layout come along. A paragraph that was wrapped at 80 characters for an 8.5×11 page brings those breaks with it.

The result: sentences broken mid-thought, words split awkwardly, and text that looks fragmented in your document.

Email Formatting

Emails often wrap at 72-80 characters for compatibility with older email systems. When you paste email content elsewhere, these forced line breaks create choppy text.

Some email clients also add line breaks when forwarding messages, creating increasingly messy formatting with each forward.

OCR and Scanned Documents

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software converts scanned documents to text. It interprets the visual layout literally, adding line breaks wherever the original document had them - whether intentional or just due to column width.

Web Scraping

Text pulled from websites often includes line breaks from the HTML structure. What looks properly formatted on a webpage becomes fragmented when converted to plain text.

Code Comments and Documentation

Code documentation often wraps at specific column widths (80 characters is traditional). Extracting this text for other uses brings those hard line breaks along.

Understanding the Cleaning Options

Remove All Line Breaks

Does exactly what it says: removes every single line break. Your entire text becomes one continuous block.

Best for:

• Short snippets that should be one line
• Text going into form fields that don't accept line breaks
• Creating single-line strings for coding
• Social media posts that need to flow continuously

Caution: This merges paragraphs together. If your text has intentional paragraph breaks you want to keep, use a different option.

Remove Single Line Breaks Only

This is the smart option for most use cases. It removes line breaks within paragraphs while keeping paragraph separations intact.

How it works: Single line breaks (one newline) get removed. Double line breaks (two newlines, indicating a paragraph break) remain.

Example:

• "This is a line[break]that continues" becomes "This is a line that continues"
• "End of paragraph.[break][break]New paragraph" stays separated

Best for:

• PDF text with preserved paragraphs
• Email content where you want to keep paragraph structure
• Most general text cleanup tasks

Replace with Space

Converts all line breaks to spaces instead of removing them. This prevents words at line endings from merging with words at line beginnings.

Example: "The quick brown[break]fox" becomes "The quick brown fox" (with space), not "brownfox" (merged).

Best for:

• Text where line breaks might split words
• OCR output that may have unusual breaks
• Any situation where you'd rather have extra spaces than merged words

Remove Extra Line Breaks

Reduces excessive line breaks to a maximum of two (one blank line between paragraphs). Text with three, four, or more consecutive line breaks gets cleaned up while maintaining paragraph separation.

Best for:

• Text with inconsistent spacing
• Documents where sections are separated by multiple blank lines
• Normalizing formatting while keeping basic structure

Additional Options Explained

Trim Extra Spaces

When enabled, this collapses multiple consecutive spaces into single spaces. Useful when removing line breaks creates double spaces.

"Word word" becomes "Word word"

Trim Start/End

Removes whitespace (spaces, tabs, line breaks) from the beginning and end of your text. Cleans up leading and trailing mess.

Common Use Cases

Cleaning PDF Content for Documents

Scenario: You're copying text from a research paper PDF into your own document. The PDF breaks every line at column width.

Solution: Paste into this tool, use "Single Only" to keep paragraphs, copy the cleaned output into your document.

Fixing Email Forwards

Scenario: You've received a heavily forwarded email where the text has accumulated line breaks from each forward, making it barely readable.

Solution: Use "Remove Extra" to clean up excessive breaks while keeping paragraph structure, or "Single Only" if the paragraphs are still distinguishable.

Preparing Text for Forms

Scenario: You need to paste an address or description into a single-line form field, but your source has line breaks.

Solution: Use "Remove All" or "Replace with Space" depending on whether you want the text collapsed or spaced.

Cleaning Up Code Documentation

Scenario: You're extracting comments from code files for documentation. The comments are wrapped at 80 characters with hard line breaks.

Solution: Use "Single Only" if there are paragraph breaks between sections, or "Replace with Space" to ensure nothing merges incorrectly.

Processing OCR Output

Scenario: You scanned a book page and ran OCR. The text follows the page layout exactly, including line breaks that don't belong in flowing text.

Solution: "Replace with Space" is safest to prevent word-merging errors from the OCR process.

Line Breaks in Different Contexts

Windows vs Mac vs Linux

Different operating systems historically used different line break characters:

• Windows: Carriage Return + Line Feed (CRLF, or \r\n)
• Mac (classic): Carriage Return only (CR, or \r)
• Mac (modern) and Linux: Line Feed only (LF, or \n)

This tool handles all three formats. You don't need to know which you have - it processes all of them the same way.

HTML Line Breaks

Web pages use <br> tags for line breaks and <p> tags for paragraphs. When you copy text from a web page, your browser usually converts these to actual line break characters.

If you're seeing the literal text "<br>" in your content, you need to remove the HTML tags first, then use this tool.

Coding and Programming

In code, line breaks serve specific purposes:

• Separating statements (in many languages)
• Formatting for readability
• Ending lines in certain file formats

Be careful using this tool on code - removing line breaks will likely break your syntax. This tool is designed for prose and content, not code.

Technical Details

What Exactly Is a Line Break?

A line break is an invisible character that tells software "start a new line here." You create one by pressing Enter/Return.

Technically, it's one or more of these characters:

• Line Feed (LF): Character code 10
• Carriage Return (CR): Character code 13

Most modern systems use LF alone. Windows uses CR+LF together. This tool handles both.

Line Break vs. Paragraph Break

A single line break moves to the next line. A paragraph break (two line breaks) indicates a new paragraph. This distinction is important:

• Line break (soft return): Same paragraph, new line
• Paragraph break (hard return): New paragraph entirely

The "Single Only" option respects this difference by only removing soft returns.

Tips for Best Results

Preview Before Copying

Always review the output before copying it to your destination. Sometimes the first option you try isn't the right one for that particular text.

Use "Single Only" as Default

When unsure, start with "Single Only." It's the safest option that cleans up line-wrapping issues while preserving intentional paragraph breaks.

Check for Merged Words

After using "Remove All," scan the output for words that may have incorrectly merged. If you see "thetext" instead of "the text," use "Replace with Space" instead.

Keep Original as Backup

The original text stays in the input field. If the output doesn't look right, you can try a different option without re-pasting the source.

Related Formatting Issues

Smart Quotes and Special Characters

PDF and email text often includes "smart quotes" (curly quotes) and other special characters that may not paste well into all destinations. This tool focuses on line breaks specifically.

Tab Characters

Some text includes tab characters for indentation. This tool leaves tabs alone - it only processes line breaks. If you need to remove tabs too, consider combining with another text processing tool.

Invisible Characters

Beyond line breaks, text can contain other invisible characters like non-breaking spaces, zero-width joiners, or soft hyphens. These won't be affected by this tool. If your text still looks odd after cleaning, there may be other invisible characters present.

Why Clean Formatting Matters

Professional Appearance

Documents with random line breaks look unprofessional. Whether it's a report, email, or social post, clean formatting signals attention to detail.

Readability

Text that flows properly is easier to read. Broken lines force readers to mentally reconnect thoughts that should be continuous.

Accurate Word Counts

If you're checking word count (for essay limits, article length, etc.), messy formatting can interfere with accurate counting in some tools.

Compatibility

Some systems don't handle line breaks well. Form fields, certain databases, and some software expects clean, flowing text. Pre-cleaning your input prevents issues.

Final Thoughts

Line break issues are everywhere. Every time you copy from a PDF, paste from an email, or work with OCR text, you're likely dealing with unwanted line breaks.

This tool handles the cleanup in seconds. Paste, click, copy - and your text is ready to use properly formatted.

No manual editing, no find-and-replace gymnastics. Just clean text, ready to go.