Text cleaning tools

Which tool should I use?

• Remove Special Characters

  Keep letters, numbers and spaces; strip everything else.

  Use it when: Only letters, numbers and spaces should survive, for instance before importing names or product titles.

• Remove Numbers

  Delete digits, or whole formatted numbers, from text.

  Use it when: Digits have to go from a transcript, a list of product names or an export, and the words must stay.

• Remove Punctuation

  Delete punctuation marks in every language.

  Use it when: You are preparing text for analysis or comparison and commas, quotes and brackets get in the way.

• Remove Emojis

  Strip emoji, flags and skin-tone variants from text.

  Use it when: Captions, chat messages or exported data contain emoji that a database or a print layout cannot handle.

• Remove Accents

  Convert é, ñ, ü and other accented letters to plain letters.

  Use it when: A search index, a file name or a legacy system only accepts basic Latin letters, so é, ñ and ü must become e, n and u.

• Clean Text

  Fix text pasted from Word, PDFs, websites and chat in one pass.

  Use it when: Text pasted from Word, a PDF, a website or a chat looks wrong and you want every common problem fixed in one pass.

• Remove Empty Lines

  Delete blank lines, or collapse several into one.

  Use it when: A list, a log or a document has blank lines in it, or runs of them that should be squeezed down to one.

• Normalize Whitespace

  Replace tabs, odd spaces and mixed line endings with standard ones.

  Use it when: Tabs, no-break spaces and mixed line endings make two texts that look identical compare as different.

What these tools have in common