About Clipboard Cleaner

Strip smart quotes, zero-widths, non-breaking spaces. Part of the DevTools Surf developer suite. Browse more tools in the Text / String collection.

Use Cases

• Cleaning text pasted from Word docs before inserting into code
• Removing invisible characters from copy-pasted stack traces
• Stripping smart quotes from content before database insertion
• Sanitizing text from PDFs before using in configuration files

Tips

• Paste text from Word or Google Docs to strip smart quotes
• Check for zero-width characters that cause invisible bugs
• Use this before pasting text into code editors or terminals

Fun Facts

• Zero-width space (U+200B) and zero-width non-joiner (U+200C) are invisible Unicode characters that have caused countless bugs in copy-pasted code.
• Smart quotes (curly quotes) were introduced in early desktop publishing in the 1980s and are encoded differently from straight quotes, causing syntax errors in code.
• The non-breaking space (U+00A0) is intentionally used in French typography before punctuation marks like colons and semicolons, but causes havoc in programming.

FAQ

What does 'cleaning' remove?

Smart quotes (curly "…"), em/en dashes, non-breaking spaces, zero-width characters, soft hyphens, and BOM bytes. Everything that pastes invisibly and breaks regex, diff tools, and identifier parsers.

Why do zero-width characters show up in pasted text?

Word processors, Slack, and some websites insert them for formatting. They're invisible until something fails to parse — then debugging is hell. The cleaner strips them in one pass.

Does it change regular punctuation?

Configurable. Smart quotes are always normalized to straight quotes. Em-dashes normalize to hyphens only if you opt in — they're legitimate in prose.

Is my clipboard read automatically?

No. Paste into the tool manually. The browser's clipboard API requires user action and this tool processes only what you paste.