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Clean Spaces

by Adrian Ramon
Tidy the spacing in text copied from the web, PDFs and emails: double spaces, non-breaking and invisible characters, trailing spaces and extra blank lines.
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Unlisted Extension

This extension is published on Adrian Ramon's page but is not listed in the main directory index.

Readme

Clean Spaces

Tidies the spacing in text copied from web pages, PDFs, emails and Word documents, with one click.

Select Dear John , and click Clean Spaces to get Dear John,.

What it fixes

ProblemBeforeAfter
Double spaces and tabs inside a linethe quick (two spaces), a tab between wordsthe quick, one space
Spaces at the start and end of lines indented line indented line
Non-breaking and other look-alike spaces10 km typed with a no-break space10 km with a normal space
Invisible characterszero-width spaces, word joiners, byte order marks, soft hyphensremoved
Runs of blank linesthree blank linesone blank line
Spaces before punctuationReally ?, word , word, ( see below )Really?, word, word, (see below)
Mixed line breaksUnicode line separators from some web pagesnormal line breaks

What it leaves alone

Some unusual spaces are there on purpose, so they are kept:

  • Thousands separators. A no-break or thin space between digits, as in 1 234 567 (the style Number Formatter can produce), stays as it is.
  • Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Full-width spaces next to those characters are normal there.
  • Thai, Lao, Khmer and Burmese. These languages don't put spaces between words, and use a zero-width space to show where a line may break.
  • Emoji. Zero-width joiners hold emoji such as 👨‍👩‍👧 together, so they are never removed.
  • Line endings. Windows line endings stay Windows line endings, and a selection that ends with a line break (as when you triple-click a paragraph) still ends with one, so it doesn't join the next paragraph.

Spaces before punctuation are only removed when the punctuation is followed by a space or the end of the line, so emoticons such as :) and spaced ellipses (. . .) aren't touched. If the selection looks like code (it has =, { }, < >, && or ||), spacing around punctuation is left alone, so a ? b : c stays readable.

To keep the PopClip bar tidy, the button only appears when the selection has something to clean.

Things to know

  • Spaces at the start and end of the selection are removed. If you select part of a sentence including the spaces either side, the words may join up with the text around it.
  • Indentation is removed by default. Turn on Keep indentation for code or indented lists.
  • In Markdown, two spaces at the end of a line mean a line break. Clean Spaces removes them.
  • With Blank lines set to Remove all, the button doesn't appear for text whose only problem is single blank lines between paragraphs.
  • French typography puts a space before ! ? ; :. Turn off Remove spaces before punctuation if you write French.

Options

  • Blank lines: at most one in a row (default), remove all, or leave as they are.
  • Remove spaces before punctuation: on by default.
  • Keep indentation at the start of lines: off by default.
  • Plain click: replace the selection (default), copy the result, or show it in PopClip.
  • ⌥-click always replaces the selection, and ⇧-click always shows the result, as in the other extensions in this set.

Privacy

Everything runs locally inside PopClip. No data is sent anywhere.

Author

Adrian Ramon.

Changelog

  • 1.0 (29 October 2026): first release.
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