Remove Line Breaks

A paragraph copied from a PDF such as “The results show that the new / method is faster” (with a break after “new”) becomes one smooth line. A shopping list of five lines becomes “milk, bread, eggs, apples, rice” with Replace with… and a comma. A wrapped plain-text email becomes normal paragraphs that re-flow in your reply. And a block of lines from a spreadsheet column can be turned into a single line separated by semicolons for pasting into a form or search box.

Choose the mode that matches what you want the text to become.

A PDF stores text as lines placed on a page, not as flowing paragraphs. When you copy from it, each line ends with a break, and long words split at the line end keep their hyphen. Emails written in plain text are often wrapped at about 72 characters for the same reason. Pasted into a word processor, the text then wraps twice and looks ragged. Joining the lines restores normal paragraphs that re-flow to any width.

When a word is broken at the end of a line and continues in lower case on the next line, the tool removes the hyphen and joins the two parts: “docu-” followed by “ment” becomes “document”. After common prefixes that form real compound words — self, well, non, co, ex, pre, post, anti, multi, semi and similar — the hyphen is kept, so “well-” followed by “known” becomes “well-known”. Invisible soft hyphens that some documents contain are removed too. Switch the option off if you want every hyphen kept exactly as it is.

In Replace with… mode, type any separator: a comma and space for a readable list, a semicolon for spreadsheets, a single space, or \n for a new line. Empty lines are skipped so the list has no gaps. Windows (CRLF) and old Mac line endings are handled the same as normal ones. Your text never leaves your browser. To remove extra spaces, tabs and invisible characters as well, use the Whitespace Remover; to remove repeated lines, use Remove Duplicate Lines.