How to clean up text pasted from Word, web pages and chat apps

Text that looks fine where you copied it can arrive somewhere else with odd quotes, invisible characters and stray spacing. This is a short checklist, in the order that works best.

What goes wrong, and why

Word processors and web editors improve text as you type. They turn straight quotes into curly ones, replace two hyphens with a long dash, and insert markup so the text keeps its formatting. Those changes are invisible while you are inside the app. When you paste into a code editor, a spreadsheet, a database field or a plain-text form, they show up as odd symbols or break things.

Chat apps and web pages add their own extras: emojis, invisible characters used for layout, and spaces that look normal but are not.

The order that works best

If the text came from a web page and you can see tags such as <p> or <div>, start with Strip HTML Tags. Turn on decoding so that entities like & become the real characters.
Run Fix Smart Quotes to turn curly quotes into straight ones. Tick the dashes option if you also want long dashes and the ellipsis symbol changed to plain characters.
Run Remove Zero-Width Characters. It reports how many hidden characters it found, which is a useful clue to where the text came from.
Run Remove Extra Spaces to collapse runs of spaces and trim line ends.
Run Remove Blank Lines, in collapse mode if you want to keep single gaps between paragraphs.

Chaining the steps

After each tool, press "Use result as input" to move the output back into the input box, then switch to the next tool. Each page remembers the options you picked, so a second pass is quick.

Symptoms and the tool that fixes them

Code or a CSV breaks on a quote character: the quotes are curly. Use Fix Smart Quotes.
A search finds nothing even though the word is clearly there: the text probably contains a hidden character. Use Remove Zero-Width Characters.
Two spaces between words, or a gap at the start of every line: use Remove Extra Spaces.
Little boxes or question marks where emojis were: use Remove Emojis if the destination cannot display them.
Angle-bracket tags inside your text: use Strip HTML Tags.

Things to keep in mind

Straight quotes are right for code, data files and many forms. For finished writing that people will read, curly quotes are often what you want, so only straighten them where the destination needs it.

Hidden characters are sometimes there for a reason. Joiners inside some languages and emoji sequences are real parts of the text, and removing them can change how it displays. Check the result if the text is not plain English.

All of this runs in your browser. Your text is not uploaded.