What does a text sanitizer actually remove?
The characters you never typed. Curly quotes from Microsoft Word, weird dashes from a PDF, invisible characters from a website, special characters from an AI chatbot — the cleaner targets that entire layer and leaves your visible wording untouched, working through five deterministic passes in a fixed order. If you want the cause rather than the cure, why text pastes weird traces each of these artifacts back to where it comes from.
1. Detection, on the untouched text
Before anything is changed, every code point is scanned and named, so the report can say "Narrow no-break space, U+202F, 3 found" instead of a vague total. This has to come first: normalization would fold several of these characters into ordinary spaces and destroy the evidence. The methodology page documents each rule.
2. Invisible character removal
We strip zero-width spaces, BiDi control marks, tag characters, and stray control codes that break search and formatting — the full list is on the invisible character remover page.
3. Unicode normalization
We apply NFKC normalization so every remaining character is in its most compatible, standard form — folding full-width variants and other Unicode quirks. It is shielded, so it never undoes a switch you turned off.
4. Spacing & newline fix
We convert non-breaking spaces (U+00A0) and narrow no-break spaces (U+202F) to normal spaces and unify mixed CRLF/LF line endings — the cure for weird spacing.
5. Typography cleaning
Conversion of curly quotes, en/em dashes, and ellipses to standard ASCII — on in the AI Clean, Safe Clean, and Plain ASCII presets, off in Keep Typography. See normalize quotes & dashes.
Is a browser-based text cleaner private?
This one is: the text never leaves your device. Unlike AI-based tools that might "rephrase" or hallucinate changes to your text, this cleaner is 100% deterministic and 100% client-side. It changes exactly what the rules are designed to fix — nothing more — and it does it entirely on your device. No text is ever sent to a server. That also makes it safe for confidential drafts, contracts, and unpublished work — including the ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini output handled by the AI text cleaner, which you'd rather not paste into yet another cloud service.