Remove Line Breaks

Text copied from a PDF, an email or a narrow web column often arrives with a hard line break at the end of every line, so it will not reflow when you paste it into a document, a form or a chat. This tool joins those lines back into flowing sentences, keeps real paragraph breaks if you want them, and repairs words that were split with a hyphen at the end of a line.

How to use this tool

1. Paste the text.
2. Choose what goes where each line break was: usually a space, or a comma to turn a list into one line.
3. Keep “paragraph breaks” ticked to preserve blank lines between paragraphs.
4. Copy the cleaned text.

Formula

Inside each paragraph: line₁ + replacement + line₂ + … ; paragraphs (separated by a blank line) stay separated when that option is on

Windows (CR LF), old Mac (CR) and Unicode line separators are all treated as line breaks. A line that ends with a lowercase letter and a hyphen, followed by a line starting with a lowercase letter, is joined without the hyphen (infor- / mation → information). This cannot tell a split word from a real hyphenated compound broken at the hyphen (well- / known), so untick the option if your text has many of those. Empty lines inside a paragraph are dropped, and runs of spaces left behind are collapsed to one.

Example

The sample has 6 lines in two paragraphs. With paragraphs kept it becomes two lines of text separated by a blank line (3 lines in total), ending “…split with a hyphen at the end of a line, like information.” and “A blank line separates this second paragraph, which should stay on its own.” That is 3 line breaks removed, one of them inside the split word infor-mation, which is rejoined without its hyphen.