What Is the Remove Line Breaks Tool?
The Remove Line Breaks tool is a free, browser-based utility that instantly strips unwanted newline characters, carriage returns, and line feeds from any block of text. Whether you have copied content from a PDF, a word processor, an email client, or a web scraper, this tool delivers clean, continuous output in one click — no software to install, no account to create, and no data ever sent to a server.
Line breaks that appear correctly in their original context often become a problem the moment you paste that text somewhere else. A PDF paragraph of five visual lines becomes five separate lines of raw text. An email quoted at column 72 arrives with hard breaks every few words. OCR-scanned documents arrive with one line per physical scan line. This tool solves all of those problems in a single step.
Why Do Unwanted Line Breaks Appear?
Unwanted line breaks are one of the most common text formatting problems that writers, developers, researchers, and data professionals encounter. They occur because different applications represent text differently at a technical level, and those representations do not translate cleanly when content moves between contexts.
PDF files are the most common culprit. PDFs store text as a series of positioned glyphs — when you copy a paragraph from a PDF, the copy engine often treats each visual line as a separate text block and inserts a newline character at the end of each. The result is that a single flowing paragraph becomes a series of short broken lines with a hard return after every sentence fragment.
Email clients, especially older systems and plain-text mail, insert hard line breaks at column 72 or column 80 for compatibility with early terminal displays. When you forward or quote such an email, these breaks persist. Word processors like Microsoft Word and Google Docs insert hidden paragraph marks that survive copy-paste. OCR software processes scanned documents one raster line at a time and produces line-by-line output. CMS and database exports sometimes include newline characters as part of field values.
Common Sources of Problematic Line Breaks
- PDF documents: Visual lines become separate text elements with hard returns.
- Email threads: Quoted text is hard-wrapped at 72 or 80 characters per line.
- OCR output: Optical character recognition splits scanned pages into raster lines.
- Exported reports: CSV and database exports often contain embedded newlines in text fields.
- Web scraping: Scraped HTML may include formatting whitespace as literal line breaks.
- CMS exports: WordPress, Drupal, and other CMS platforms sometimes export body text with paragraph-level line endings embedded.
How to Use This Tool — Step by Step
Using the Remove Line Breaks tool takes under ten seconds. There are no settings to configure for basic use, and the result is immediately available to copy.
- Copy your text from any source — a PDF, an email, a document, or a web page.
- Paste the text into the input box at the top of this page.
- Choose your preferred mode: Replace with space (the default, which prevents words from running together) or Remove completely (which removes the newline without inserting a space).
- Click the Remove Line Breaks button.
- Review the output in the output box. If additional cleanup is needed (such as extra spaces), use the Remove Extra Spaces tool next.
- Click Copy to send the cleaned text to your clipboard.