Rich text includes formatting like bold, italics, colors, fonts, hyperlinks, and embedded images — commonly from word processors (Microsoft Word, Google Docs), email clients, or web editors. When you paste rich text into a plain-text environment (code editor, database field, plain email, CMS), hidden formatting codes can cause issues. Stripping rich text gives you clean, portable, universally compatible plain text. Simply pasting into our input box automatically strips all rich formatting — the textarea only accepts plain text. For deeper cleaning, use the options above.

If you've copied text that contains raw HTML tags (e.g., from a webpage's source code or an exported file), simply enable the "Strip HTML" option. This removes all HTML/XML tags including attributes, leaving only the textual content. Our regex-based cleaner handles nested tags, self-closing tags, and malformed markup gracefully. Combined with "Remove Extra Spaces" and "Trim Edges", you'll get perfectly clean plain text.

Absolutely safe. 100% client-side processing. All text cleaning happens directly in your browser using JavaScript. Your text never leaves your device — it is not uploaded to any server, stored, logged, or transmitted. This makes our tool ideal for sensitive content, confidential documents, passwords, API keys, or proprietary data. You can even disconnect your internet after loading the page and the tool will continue working perfectly.

Non-printable characters are invisible control codes (ASCII 0–31 and 127–159) such as null bytes, bell characters, vertical tabs, and escape sequences. They often sneak into text from legacy systems, OCR output, or corrupted files. These characters can break text processing, cause display glitches, or interfere with search functionality. Our "Remove Non-Printable" option safely strips them while preserving standard whitespace (spaces, tabs, line breaks).

Unicode normalization (NFKC) converts characters to their canonical composed form. This means: full-width Latin letters become half-width (e.g., Ａ → A), ligatures decompose (fi → fi), superscript/subscript numbers become regular digits, and visually similar Unicode characters are standardized. This is especially useful when dealing with text from international sources, PDF exports, or when you need consistent, database-safe text. Enable "Normalize Unicode" to homogenize these variations.

For Word/Google Docs content, we recommend the "Quick Clean" preset or manually enabling: Strip HTML, Remove Extra Spaces, Trim Edges, Remove Non-Printable, and Normalize Punctuation. Word documents often contain smart quotes ("curly quotes"), em-dashes, and other typographic characters that don't render well everywhere. The "Normalize Punctuation" option converts these to standard ASCII equivalents. Pasting directly into our textarea automatically removes all Word-specific formatting like fonts, colors, and styles.

Stripping rich text happens automatically when you paste into a plain textarea — all visual formatting (bold, italic, fonts, colors, sizes) is lost because textareas only store raw characters. Stripping HTML is the additional step of removing HTML tags (<tag>) from text that already contains them as literal strings. Think of it this way: pasting from Word into the textarea strips the formatting; enabling "Strip HTML" cleans any remaining markup code in the text itself. Both are complementary for achieving truly clean output.