Whitespace Cleaner

Taming invisible whitespace

Whitespace is the text you cannot see: trailing spaces at line ends, runs of blank lines, tabs mixed with spaces, and non-breaking spaces that masquerade as regular ones. A cleaner trims trailing spaces, collapses consecutive blank lines, and converts tabs to a chosen number of spaces so a file is consistent.

Why it matters

Trailing whitespace creates noisy diffs where a line appears changed but is not. Mixed tabs and spaces break indentation-sensitive languages like Python and YAML. A sneaky non-breaking space (U+00A0) looks like a space but fails string comparisons and breaks parsing, which is a classic cause of a config value that looks correct but is rejected.

Example

Before (· = space, --> = tab):
"hello···\n\n\n-->world···"

After trim, collapse blanks, tab->2 spaces:
"hello\n\nworld"

Tabs to spaces, and the width question

Converting a tab is not always one tab to a fixed count. Elastic tab stops align to the next column boundary, so a tab at column 3 with a width of 4 only adds one space to reach column 4. Simple conversion replaces each tab with a flat N spaces, which is fine for most code but can misalign tables.

FAQ

Why does my value still fail after I removed spaces? A non-breaking space or zero-width character may remain. Those are whitespace to the eye but distinct code points to the parser.

Does it touch spaces inside my text? Trailing-space removal only affects the ends of lines; interior spacing is left alone unless you also collapse internal runs.

Can it fix line endings too? Collapsing blank lines and normalizing endings often go together, since a stray CRLF can leave what looks like an empty line.