Paste text out of a PDF, Word or a chat window and invisible characters come with it. This strips them — zero-width spaces, curly quotes, non-breaking spaces, broken line wraps — and tells you exactly what it changed.
Text that looks fine on screen can carry characters you cannot see. They come from the software it was written in, not from the writer, and they survive copy-paste intact.
" receives ”.None of this is exotic. It is the ordinary residue of moving text between programs, and it is why a paragraph that looked right in one window arrives broken in another.
It will not change whether an AI detector flags your text. People sometimes reach for a cleaner because they have heard that curly quotes or em dashes are an “AI tell”. Detectors do not work that way: ours reads wording, sentence rhythm and predictability, not which glyph a quotation mark uses. Swapping punctuation changes nothing about the score, and we are not going to imply otherwise to sell a tool.
If your writing is being flagged and you wrote it, the useful pages are why false positives happen and how to prove you wrote it. If you want text that reads less mechanically, that is an editing problem, not a punctuation one — see the humanizer.
It also will not fix spelling or grammar, and it does not rewrite anything. Every rule is a mechanical substitution, listed above, with a count of how many times it fired.
A paragraph copied out of a journal PDF typically arrives like this, with a hyphenated wrap, hard line breaks, curly quotes and a doubled space:
The inter- national study found that “most participants” did not report any change.
With every rule on, that becomes a single clean line, and the report tells you it made five changes across four rules:
The international study found that "most participants" did not report any change.
Every rule can be switched off individually. If you want the em dashes kept because you are pasting into prose rather than code, untick that one and the rest still run.
This tool makes no network request. The cleaning runs in JavaScript in your browser, which is why it updates as you type and why there is no daily limit on it. Nothing is sent to our API, nothing is stored, and there is no account to create.
That is true of five of our tools — this one, the word counter, the readability checker, text compare and the vocabulary checker. The rest, including the AI detector, do send your text to our API to be processed, and those pages say so. Details are in the content handling policy.
A text cleaner strips formatting residue out of text you have pasted from somewhere else: invisible characters like zero-width spaces and byte-order marks, non-breaking spaces, curly quotes, bullet glyphs, and line breaks left over from a PDF. It changes characters and whitespace only, never wording.
No. AI detectors read wording, sentence rhythm and how predictable each word is, not which glyph a quotation mark or dash uses. Replacing curly quotes with straight ones does not change a detection score, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. If you wrote the text and it was flagged, that is a false positive and a different problem.
No. This tool runs entirely in your browser and makes no network request. That is also why it has no daily limit. Five of our tools work this way; the rest send text to our API and say so on their own pages.
They are added by the software the text came from. PDF exporters insert soft hyphens and line breaks, word processors insert non-breaking spaces and smart quotes, and web pages sometimes carry zero-width spaces used for line-break control. None of it is visible, and all of it survives a copy-paste.
Yes. Every rule is a separate checkbox and runs independently. Untick the ones you want to keep and the rest still apply, and the report tells you which rules actually fired and how many times.
No, and it does not rewrite anything. Every rule is a mechanical substitution on characters and whitespace. For grammar use the grammar checker; for wording use the paraphraser.