Extra spaces remover — one space where two were

Double spaces are the typographic scar tissue of almost every workflow: the typing habit half the internet learned in school, the space a deleted word leaves behind, the tab a spreadsheet pastes as six blanks, the no-break space a layout tool inserts between a number and its unit. In a word processor they are invisible; in a CMS field, a CSV cell or a search index they are very visible characters — and they are why “well known” and “well known” can fail a match.

By default the tool squeezes every run of two-or-more spaces or tabs down to exactly one space, then trims the leftovers at the start and end of each line. It never touches single spaces, so real word separation survives untouched, and it never joins words: “a b” becomes “a b”, not “ab”. Line breaks stay where they are — this page is about horizontal spacing, and the line break remover handles the vertical kind.

Switch on the no-break space option and the sweep widens: U+00A0, the ideographic space U+3000, the BOM U+FEFF and every other exotic member of the space family are normalized to a plain space first, then squeezed like the rest. That is the mode for text copied from PDFs and styled documents, where the invisible spaces are usually the ones breaking a search or an import. The counter above counts every space character the tool removed, not the runs.