Remove Line Breaks

What the tool does with each line

Lines are joined in order. With Replace with space, the spaces at the end of a line and the indentation at the start of the next are dropped before joining, so you never get double spaces in the middle of a sentence. With Remove completely, lines are glued together exactly as they are.

Empty lines, including lines that contain only spaces, are removed. With Keep paragraph breaks turned on, they mark paragraph boundaries instead: each paragraph becomes one line, and a single empty line separates paragraphs, however many there were in the original.

Where hard line breaks come from

• PDFs: copied text keeps the line breaks of the printed layout, and columns can add more.
• Emails: plain-text messages are often wrapped at 72–76 characters, and replies add more breaks with every quote level.
• Terminals and logs: long lines are wrapped to the window width.
• OCR: scanned documents come out line by line.

Pasting such text into a word processor or a CMS leaves short ragged lines that cannot reflow. Removing the breaks first gives text that wraps naturally at any width.

Common mistakes

• Removing paragraph breaks you wanted to keep. Without Keep paragraph breaks, a three-paragraph text becomes one block. Turn the option on before copying.
• Joining code or poetry. Line breaks carry meaning in code, addresses, verse and lists. Only remove them from running prose.
• Using Remove completely for prose. “lazy⏎dog” becomes “lazydog”. Use it only for links, codes and languages written without spaces.
• Expecting bullet lists to survive. A list pasted from a PDF turns into one line. Remove the breaks only in the paragraphs, or use remove empty lines if all you want is to drop blank lines.