How do I remove line breaks from text copied out of a PDF?
Paste the broken text into FixDoks's Remove Line Breaks tool. It joins lines back into normal sentences, replacing each break with a space, nothing, a comma or an HTML tag, and can keep blank lines between paragraphs. The cleanup happens instantly in your browser as you paste, with no length limit.
Remove Line Breaks at a glance
| Input | Text with unwanted line breaks, for example copied from a PDF |
|---|---|
| Output | Joined paragraphs with your chosen replacement for each break |
| Processing | In your browser; your files are not uploaded |
| Price | Free |
| Works on | Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox on Windows, Mac, Android and iPhone |
How to use Remove Line Breaks
- Paste the text that has unwanted breaks in the middle of sentences.
- Choose what to put in place of each break: a space, nothing, a comma or an HTML <br>.
- Tick Keep paragraph breaks if you want to keep blank lines between paragraphs.
- Copy or download the cleaned text.
Why does copied text have broken lines?
When you copy text from a PDF, the lines break exactly where they wrapped on the page. Paste that into Word, an email or a form and every line ends early, leaving a ragged column of short lines. Emails that were forwarded several times, subtitles and text copied from some websites have the same problem. This tool joins those lines back into normal sentences.
Options
- Replace with a space: the usual choice. "The quick brown" and "fox jumps" on two lines become "The quick brown fox jumps".
- Remove completely: joins lines with nothing in between. Useful for long codes, keys or numbers that were split across lines.
- Replace with comma + space: turns a list with one item per line into a single line such as "Pune, Delhi, Mumbai". Handy for tags or email recipients.
- Replace with <br>: keeps the visual line breaks but in HTML form, for pasting into a web page or CMS.
- Keep paragraph breaks: a blank line marks a new paragraph. With this ticked, single breaks inside a paragraph are removed but the blank lines between paragraphs stay.
- Collapse repeated spaces: PDFs often add double spaces. This turns any run of spaces into one.
Fixing hyphenated words
Some PDFs split long words at the end of a line with a hyphen, for example "informa-" and "tion". After joining, you will see "informa- tion". Use the find and replace tool with the regular expression (\w)- (\w) and replace it with $1$2 to rejoin them. Check the result, because real hyphenated words like "well- known" would be joined too.
Windows, Mac and Linux line endings
Windows files end lines with two characters (CR and LF), older Mac files with CR, and Linux and modern Mac files with LF. This tool handles all three, so you do not need to worry about where the text came from.
Common uses
- Pasting a paragraph from a PDF research paper into your notes or an assignment.
- Turning a column of Excel cells into one comma separated line.
- Cleaning up an address or description before pasting it into an online form that only accepts one line.
- Preparing text for a translation tool, which translates better when sentences are not broken.
Nothing you paste is uploaded. The cleaning happens in your browser, so it also works for confidential text such as contracts or medical notes.