Remove Line Breaks – Rejoin text copied from PDFs and OCR without flattening paragraph breaks. Choose a separator, review the result, then copy or download it.
How to handle breaks
Extra tidy-up
Result
Before vs after
Table of Contents
Remove hard line breaks from PDF and OCR text
Printed text with a hard return at the end of each line is difficult to convert to text. A hard return at the end of each line in printed text is difficult to convert to text. Those breaks can interrupt sentences even if the paragraph is without interruption. Enter the text above and select keep paragraph breaks to join words wrapped by a line-end hyphen but keep the paragraph breaks at blank lines, or select Smart PDF/OCR cleanup to join words wrapped by a line-end hyphen as well.
Smart cleanup is a text heuristic, not document reconstruction. It is only added to a hyphenated word if the line ends in an hyphen and the next line starts with a lower case letter. Read over the preview, particularly technical vocabulary, names, and lists.
Select what to use for a line break
Separate wrapped prose with a space to make it readable as a paragraph. Select a comma, semicolon or a tab for a spreadsheet paste or another separator for another format; specify one value per line. The Remove breaks entirely option merges characters that are separated by nothing, it will not retain paragraph boundaries.
Input: Red
green
blue
Output with comma and space: Red, green, blueRemove pasted text without uploading it
Insert text, choose a cleanup mode and check the results as settings are altered. It is processed in this page in your browser, NOT sent to a cleanup service. See the input or the result, download the result to a text file or use the cleaned result as input.
- Remove spaces and tabs at the beginning and end of lines of input (trim line edges).
- Collapse repeated spaces and tabs tidies runs of horizontal whitespace.
- The Remove Blank Lines option will remove blank lines from the result.
Other ways to remove line breaks
You can substitute in-cell line feeds for spaces in a formula in Excel: =SUBSTITUTE(A1,CHAR(10)," "). If the formula introduces a carriage return, check the imported data for a carriage return as well. Find and replace can identify manual line breaks as a separate character, and can replace a space, instead of a paragraph mark, when joining words; test a selection by replacing it and then test it out in the document.
A line break which is only visible but not saved is not a visual line wrap. If a line is just wrapped in the editor window due to the width, then there’s not a character that this tool can remove.
Related Tools
FAQ
Will this line break remover upload text?
No. There will be no cleanup or statistics running in your browser. When the result is correct, copy or download it.
Does clever clean up retain paragraphs?
It preserves blank-line paragraph separators and will connect non blank paragraphs. Does not assume paragraphs if they are not included in the source.
Is there a possibility to use a user defined line-break replacement?
Yes. Click custom separator and type the text you want to use to separate concatenated lines. Blank-line boundaries are separated in paragraph modes, unless you want to drop empty lines.
Is it possible to remove line breaks in Excel?
Yes. You can enter the text of the cell here, and select a space separator or a custom separator. If you’re using a formula, then you can use the Excel SUBSTITUTE function to replace line-feed characters within a cell.
What line ending(s) do you support?
Prior to cleanup, these are normalized to Windows CRLF, Unix/Linux LF, legacy Mac CR, or Unicode line/paragraph separators.
Reviewed by: aFreeTools Editorial Team
Last updated: September 28, 2026
Freshness: Checked against messy real-world input — OCR scans, exported tickets, copied chat threads — and kept deliberately small so it loads fast and stays predictable.
Disclaimer – This tool is provided for general convenience and educational purposes. It runs entirely in your browser and does not send your text to any server. Always keep your own backup of important text, and check the result before using it in production systems.