Remove Extra Spaces
Collapse runs of multiple spaces into a single space. Tabs and newlines are preserved.
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About Remove Extra Spaces
This tool collapses runs of two or more spaces into a single space. Tabs and line breaks are preserved exactly. Useful for cleaning up text where the spacing has gone irregular — common with OCR output, scraped web content, or hand-edited prose.
When to use it
- Cleaning up text where someone hit space twice between words
- Normalizing OCR output that uses variable spacing
- Fixing prose after global find-and-replace introduced double spaces
- Preparing text for consistent tokenization
How it works
The regex / {2,}/g matches two or more consecutive ASCII spaces and replaces each match with a single space. Tabs, newlines, and other whitespace characters are not touched.
Examples
Hello world. How are you?
Hello world. How are you?
Frequently asked questions
- Are tabs affected?
- No. Only ASCII space characters are collapsed. Use trim-leading or tabs-to-spaces if you also want to handle tabs.
- Does it remove single leading/trailing spaces?
- No. The regex requires two or more in a row. To trim ends, run trim-all first.
- Does it collapse spaces inside quoted strings?
- Yes — the tool is purely textual and doesn't understand quotes or other context. If quoted strings should preserve their spacing, do it manually.