Remove Line Breaks

Text copied out of a PDF or an email often has a line break at the end of every line rather than at the end of every paragraph, which leaves it broken and choppy once you paste it somewhere else. The Remove Line Breaks tool reflows that text back into clean, continuous paragraphs – or turns it into a separator-delimited list, if that is what you actually need.

Copy and paste your text, choose a mode and get a clean result in seconds.

How to Use the Remove Line Breaks Tool

1. Just type or paste your text right into the box.

   

2. Pick a mode: Remove all line breaks (join with space), which is selected to start with, Remove only empty lines, or Replace breaks with a separator.

   

3. If you chose the separator option, set the Separator field – it starts as a comma and a space. Clear any blank lines out of your text first, or each one becomes an empty item in the result.

   

4. Click Clean Text to get the result.

   

5. Click Copy to grab it, or Clear to start over.

   

What Does Removing Line Breaks Mean?

A line break is the invisible character created every time you press Enter or Return, marking where one line ends and the next begins. The removal of line breaks removes the line breaks so the text flows together instead of staying broken across separate lines.

It is most important for text that has been formatted into a fixed width elsewhere, such as a PDF, a printed page, an old email, etc., where any sentence or paragraph may end at any point in the line irrespective of where the line itself is wrapped. After that has been pasted into a place with different formatting, those old line breaks appear as strange and unwanted line breaks in the middle of the sentences.

This tool provides you three options to handle that:

When Should You Remove Line Breaks?

• Fixing text copied from a PDF that broke every line at the page margin instead of at paragraph ends
• Cleaning up an email reply that carried over odd line breaks from a mobile client
• Converting a line-by-line list into a comma-separated or pipe-separated string for a spreadsheet or script
• Formatting poetry, scripts or old documents back into standard paragraph format
• Creating a single-line text that will only fit in a field, such as a meta description or form input.
• Putting scraped or exported content back into readable paragraphs prior to publish

Do’s and Don’ts for Removing Line Breaks

Things to Know Before Removing Line Breaks

• A hard line break will differ from a soft wrap (one done by a word processor or browser to wrap text for screen, which are not characters in the text itself) — this tool will only affect hard wraps.
• When you delete only empty lines, you will better preserve a distinction between paragraphs and within paragraphs if your source text has multiple double line breaks between paragraphs and single line breaks within paragraphs.
• The separator is not limited to a single character – a word, a symbol or several characters all work.
• Windows and Mac use different invisible characters to mark a line break. This tool recognises both, so text from either system is cleaned the same way.

How to Choose the Right Text Separator

If you select ‘Replace breaks with a separator’ then it is determined by where the result is going:

• Comma: the standard choice for CSV-style data or a simple, readable list (e.g., “apples, oranges, bananas”).
• Pipe ( | ): useful when your data might already contain commas, since a pipe is far less likely to appear naturally inside the text itself.
• Semicolon: a common alternative to commas in regions or systems where the comma is already used as a decimal separator.
• Tab: the right choice when pasting the result directly into a spreadsheet, since most spreadsheet apps split on tabs automatically.

Whatever you choose, be sure to choose a character that is not used in your text already, otherwise later on, anyone reading the results would not be able to distinguish the real separator from a random match.

Frequently Asked Questions