Remove Line Breaks

The Remove Line Breaks tool flattens multi-line text into a single line or a cleaner paragraph structure, removing unwanted hard returns and line wraps. This is common after copying text from PDFs (where every visual line becomes a newline in the clipboard), emails with hard-wrapped paragraphs, PowerPoint text boxes, or print-optimized web pages. You want the underlying sentences without the break-every-80-characters artifact, so you can reformat for a different medium or paste into a wider container.

The tool gives you three removal modes with distinct behavior. \"Remove all line breaks\" joins every line with a space or nothing, producing a single long line — useful for prose that should flow as one paragraph. \"Keep paragraph breaks\" preserves double-newline separators (which indicate paragraphs) but joins single newlines within paragraphs — the common case for cleaning up hard-wrapped prose. \"Convert to spaces\" replaces every newline with a single space, collapsing the document to one horizontal line. Choose the right mode for your content: prose usually wants paragraph-break mode, single sentences want all-breaks-removed, identifiers and tabular data rarely should have breaks removed at all.

Line breaks come in four varieties: LF (\\n, Unix/macOS), CRLF (\\r\\n, Windows), CR (\\r, classic Mac), and LS (U+2028, Unicode line separator). A paragraph separator (\\r\\n\\r\\n or \\n\\n) visually distinguishes paragraphs from mid-paragraph wrapping.

Removing all breaks is one regex replace: /[\\r\\n\\u2028\\u2029]+/g → \"\" or \" \". The g flag ensures every occurrence is handled.

Preserving paragraph breaks requires distinguishing between single newlines (in-paragraph wrap) and double newlines (paragraph boundaries). Algorithm: replace one or more consecutive newlines with a sentinel token (e.g., §PARA§), split the text on that token, join each paragraph\u2019s lines with a space, then rejoin paragraphs with \\n\\n. This preserves paragraph structure while flattening in-paragraph breaks.

Converting to spaces: /[\\r\\n]+/g → \" \". Simpler than paragraph preservation but loses paragraph structure.

PDFs often insert soft hyphens at end-of-line breaks (U+00AD). When removing the break, the hyphen joins the word on the next line, but without removing the hyphen too, you get \"con- cat\" instead of \"concat\". The tool offers a \"heal hyphenation\" option that detects hyphen-at-end-of-line + letter-at-start-of-next-line patterns and removes the hyphen.

Trailing whitespace on each line also lingers after a break; combining this tool with whitespace trim is common. The tool includes a \"trim lines before joining\" option for this.

Line ending normalization: the tool accepts any input line endings and outputs with the convention you choose (LF, CRLF, or remove entirely). Mixed input is normalized first to avoid double-processing.

Performance: regex operations on multi-megabyte text run in under a second. No memory concerns for typical document-size input.

Compared to manually pressing backspace at each line end, this tool handles hundreds of lines in a single operation with the right preservation of paragraph structure. Manual editing scales badly; this tool scales with zero effort.

Compared to text editor find-and-replace with \\n, this tool knows about paragraph vs in-paragraph breaks and handles hyphenation healing. Editors can do the flat find-replace but lose the nuance this tool provides.

Compared to Unix tr or sed, this tool has a friendlier UI and live preview. CLI tools are better for scripted processing of many files; this tool is better for interactive one-off cleanup.