What the plain text converter does
Text copied from social media bios, font generators, PDFs and chat apps often carries more than it seems. A name in a fancy font is really a string of maths symbols. A sentence from a word processor has curly quotes and long dashes. A message may hide zero width spaces that break a password field or a spreadsheet formula. This tool finds those characters and swaps them for their plain keyboard versions.
Use it when:
- text from a font generator will not work in a username field or search box
- a pasted name or code does not match even though it looks identical
- a form rejects text with “invalid characters”
- you need straight quotes for code, CSV files or a command line
- someone sent you strike-through or glitch text and you want to read it normally
How to use it
- Paste into Text to clean. A sample with mixed problems is loaded so you can see the result first.
- The Plain text box updates as you type.
- Choose what to clean. Five options are on by default:
- Fancy fonts to normal letters
- Curly quotes, dashes and ellipses to keyboard ones
- Remove invisible characters
- Remove glitch and strike-through marks
- Fix odd and double spaces
- Two options are off by default: Remove accents (é to e) and Remove emoji.
- Press Copy or Download. The note under the tool says how many characters were cleaned.
Examples
Each result was produced by this tool with its default settings unless the table says otherwise.
| You paste | You get |
|---|---|
| 𝗕𝗼𝗹𝗱 text | Bold text |
| 𝐼𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑐 | Italic |
| 𝓈𝒸𝓇𝒾𝓅𝓉 | script |
| 𝔹𝕒𝕝𝕝 | Ball |
| ｗｉｄｅ | wide |
| Ⓑⓤⓑⓑⓛⓔ | Bubble |
| ꜱᴍᴀʟʟ ᴄᴀᴘꜱ | small caps |
| S̶t̶r̶i̶k̶e̶ | Strike |
| “It’s fine,” she said… | “It’s fine,” she said… |
| Wait, then an em dash, then what? (written with no spaces) | Wait-what? |
| Café crème, with Remove accents on | Cafe creme |
| Great job followed by two emoji, with Remove emoji on | Great job |
How it works
Unicode, the standard behind all text on computers, includes many characters that are styled copies of normal letters. Most of them come with an official note saying which plain letter they stand for. The converter uses that information to map each styled letter back to A to Z or 0 to 9. A few styles, such as small capitals and the black squared letters, have no official link, so the tool uses its own table for those.
The other options work the same way, one group of characters at a time:
- Curly quotes, dashes and ellipses become ’ and “ and - and three full stops. That includes the em dash (U+2014), the en dash (U+2013) and the minus sign. Bullets become hyphens.
- Invisible characters are removed. These include the zero width space, zero width joiner, soft hyphen, byte order mark, direction marks and blank filler characters such as Hangul Filler and Braille Blank.
- Glitch and strike-through marks are combining marks stacked on top of letters. Removing them leaves the letters underneath. A single accent that belongs to a letter, such as the one in é, is kept.
- Odd spaces such as the no-break space and the em space become normal spaces, and runs of spaces inside a line shrink to one.
Hindi, Arabic, Chinese and other scripts are left alone. Only the specific characters above are changed.
Tips and limits
- Superscript digits stay. Converting x² to x2 would change its meaning, so numbers written as superscripts are not touched.
- Upside down and mirrored text use look-alike letters from other alphabets. Those are not converted back. For mirrored text, use the reverse direction of the mirror text generator.
- Accents are a choice. Leave Remove accents off for names and normal writing. Turn it on for file names, URLs and systems that only accept ASCII.
- Emoji removal also removes symbols such as the copyright sign, because Unicode files them in the same group.
- If you only need to deal with long dashes, the em dash remover gives you more control over what replaces them.
Other ways to do it
In Microsoft Word and Google Docs, Paste as plain text (Ctrl+Shift+V in most browsers and in Docs) drops bold, colors and links, but it keeps fancy Unicode letters, curly quotes and invisible characters, because those are characters, not formatting. In Excel or Google Sheets, =CLEAN(A1) removes some control characters and =TRIM(A1) removes extra spaces, but neither touches styled letters. In code, Unicode normalization (text.normalize('NFKC') in JavaScript or unicodedata.normalize('NFKC', text) in Python) converts most styled letters, though it also changes things you may want to keep, such as ½ and superscripts.
To strip HTML tags or Markdown symbols instead, use the text formatting remover. To clean up spaces and blank lines only, use the whitespace remover.