How does removing line breaks work here?

Every newline — both Windows \r\n and Unix \n — is replaced with a single character of your choosing, which defaults to a space. Replacing with a space rather than deleting is what stops the last word of one line from being glued to the first word of the next, which is almost always what you want when reflowing text into one paragraph.

What does the "remove extra spaces" option do?

It collapses every run of consecutive whitespace into a single space and then trims leading and trailing whitespace off the whole result. This runs after the line breaks are gone, so it also tidies up indentation left behind by the removal. Untick it if you need to preserve deliberate double spaces or paragraph indentation.

Does it remove tabs as well as newlines?

Not on its own — the line-break replacement only targets newline characters. Tabs are handled by the "remove extra spaces" checkbox, which treats them as whitespace and converts them to a single space. If you only want newlines gone while keeping every tab exactly as it is, leave the checkbox unticked.

Can I replace line breaks with something other than a space?

Yes. The replacement field accepts any single character — a comma, a semicolon, a hyphen, an underscore or a full stop all work, which is what you want when turning lines into CSV-style or delimiter-separated values. The field is limited to one character on purpose, since inserting several would silently merge the surrounding words together.

Remove Line Breaks

Free online remove line breaks. Strip line breaks, extra spaces, clean text. No sign-up, works in your browser.

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Remove extra spaces

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Paste text above to remove line breaks

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Frequently Asked Questions about Remove Line Breaks

Remove Line Breaks — Fix Text That Wrapped Itself

This tool strips newlines from your text and joins it back into a single flowing line. It exists for one very common problem: text that was hard-wrapped somewhere, or copied out of a PDF, email or fixed-width field, now breaks awkwardly and blows a character limit you did not expect to hit.

You choose what replaces each line break — a single space by default, which is right for prose. Setting it to nothing produces a joined-up mess, which is occasionally what you want for a URL or a code fragment but rarely what you want for a paragraph. There is also a toggle to collapse runs of multiple spaces afterwards.

What It Actually Does, Precisely

Two transformations run, in order, and both are worth understanding because they determine whether you get the result you expected:

Every newline is replaced. Both Windows-style and Unix-style line endings are handled, so pasting from either platform works identically.
Optionally, whitespace is collapsed. With "Remove extra spaces" on, any run of two or more whitespace characters becomes a single space, and the result is trimmed at both ends. This is the option that fixes three blank lines, not just one.

The order matters. Line breaks are replaced first, and only then is whitespace collapsed — so with a space as the replacement you never end up with a doubled space at the seam, which is the usual artefact of naive find-and- replace. Turning off the extra-spaces step leaves those seams alone, which is what you want if the line breaks were deliberate and you only meant to remove the odd one.

Where Broken Wrapping Comes From

Copying from a PDF. The most frequent cause by a wide margin. PDFs store text as positioned glyphs, so the line breaks you see are layout artefacts of the page, not part of the content. This is why a paragraph lifted from a paper arrives as a dozen short lines.
Fixed-width database fields. A column set to 50 characters inserts a newline every 50 characters regardless of word boundaries, so words are often split mid-syllable.
Email and forum quoting. Each reply level is prefixed with > characters, and the whole quoted history arrives inside what should have been a single field.
Plain-text formats. CSV, JSON and log files are often displayed with wrapping added by the viewer rather than present in the file.
Word processors configured to hard-wrap. Documents set to wrap at a fixed column for printing or for encoding into a narrow field.

Before and After

Input	Output (replacement = space, collapse on)
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog	The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Line one Line two	Line one Line two
word1 word2	word1 word2
Trailing spaces here	Trailing spaces here

Notice the third row. When a line break splits a single word across two lines, joining with a space produces word1 word2 rather than word1word2. That is usually correct for prose and wrong for data lifted from a narrow fixed-width field, where the line break fell mid-token. If you are cleaning CSV-like data, set the replacement to nothing instead.

Related Cleanup Tools

Character Counter — confirm the cleaned text now fits the limit, including the check for hidden characters.
Invisible Character Finder — remove zero-width and non-breaking characters that survive this step and quietly break URLs and searches.
Punctuation Fixer — clean up spacing and doubled punctuation after the joins.
Text Diff Checker — confirm the change was only whitespace, by comparing the two versions.
Case Converter — normalise the capitalisation of the result.
Reverse Text — the other direction, for checking palindromes and similar patterns.

All text processing runs locally in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, which makes it safe for unpublished documents and confidential copy.