AI Text Cleaner

Strip smart quotes, em dashes, invisible Unicode and odd spaces from AI-generated or pasted text.

🔒 Runs entirely in your browser — nothing you type is uploaded or stored on a server.

The AI Text Cleaner turns “dirty” pasted text into clean, plain text. Text copied from ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Word, Google Docs or a web page is full of typographic characters you didn't type: curly “smart” quotes, em and en dashes, ellipsis characters, non-breaking spaces, and even completely invisible Unicode characters like zero-width spaces. This tool finds and fixes all of them in one pass, and tells you exactly how many characters it changed.

These characters cause real problems. Invisible characters and odd spaces break code, configuration files, spreadsheet formulas, passwords and search matching. Smart quotes crash scripts and make JSON invalid. And the distinctive em-dash-heavy, curly-quoted style of AI output is something many writers now prefer to normalise before publishing. Passing text through a cleaner gives you something that behaves like text you typed yourself, byte for byte.

Every fix is optional — tick only what you want. Straighten quotes, convert em and en dashes to plain hyphens, turn the … character into three real dots, replace non-breaking and thin spaces with normal spaces, delete zero-width and other invisible characters, and optionally normalise fancy bullets to a simple “-”. It all runs live in your browser as you type, and nothing is uploaded.

How to use

  1. Paste your text — from ChatGPT, Word, a PDF or any web page — into the input box.
  2. Tick the fixes you want; the defaults handle the common cases.
  3. The cleaned text appears instantly, with a count of how many characters were fixed.
  4. Click “Copy clean text” and paste the result wherever you need it.

Examples

Cleaning ChatGPT output
A paragraph full of em dashes and curly quotes — “like this” — becomes plain text with straight quotes and simple hyphens, ready for your CMS or editor.
Fixing broken code
A code snippet copied from a blog post fails to run because its quotes are curly. One pass through the cleaner and it compiles.
Invisible character hunt
A password or API key that “looks right” but keeps failing often contains a zero-width space. The cleaner removes it and reports “1 character fixed”.
Word to web
Text drafted in Microsoft Word pastes into a web form with non-breaking spaces and smart punctuation; cleaning it first avoids odd rendering.

Frequently asked questions

What are invisible Unicode characters?
Characters with no visible glyph — zero-width spaces, zero-width joiners, direction marks, soft hyphens and the byte-order mark. They sneak in when text is copied between apps and can break code, logins and search, because the text looks right but isn't.
Why does AI-generated text have these characters?
Chat interfaces render typographically “nice” punctuation — curly quotes, em dashes, real ellipsis characters — and copying preserves them. Word processors do the same via autocorrect. None of it is wrong, but it's often not what you want in plain text.
Will it change my words or formatting?
No. It only substitutes or removes the specific punctuation and space characters you tick. Your wording, line breaks and paragraphs are untouched.
How do I know it did anything?
The counter under the output reports exactly how many characters were fixed. If it says zero, your text was already clean.
Does it remove em dashes completely?
It replaces each em dash with a spaced hyphen (“ - ”) so your sentence still reads correctly, and en dashes with a plain hyphen. If you'd rather delete or reword them, use the Find & Replace tool afterwards.
Is my text private?
Yes. The cleaning happens entirely in your browser — nothing you paste is uploaded, logged or stored.

Related tools

Remove Line BreaksStrip line breaks, collapse extra spaces, trim whitespace and delete blank lines — all with simple toggles.Find & ReplaceReplace every occurrence of a word or phrase, with case-sensitive and whole-word options.Case ConverterInstantly switch text between UPPERCASE, lowercase, Title Case, Sentence case and aLtErNaTiNg case.Text ComparePaste two versions of a text and see every added and removed line highlighted instantly.Word CounterLive word count, character count, reading time and keyword density — instantly as you type.