Remove line breaks from text copied from PDFs and emails
Copy a paragraph out of a PDF, an old email or a terminal and you usually get a line break at the end of every line, plus words chopped in half with a hyphen. Pasted into a document, a form or a chat, it looks broken. The Remove Line Breaks tool joins those lines back into clean, flowing text in one click.
It does more than delete every newline. Paragraph breaks are kept so your text stays readable, words that were hyphenated across lines are repaired (“com-” + “panies” becomes “companies”), and stray spaces are tidied. You can also join lines with a comma, a semicolon or any separator you like — handy for turning a column of values into a comma-separated list. It all runs privately in your browser.
How to use the Remove Line Breaks
- Paste the text into “Text with line breaks”.
- Choose what to put where each line break was: a space (normal prose), nothing, a comma, a semicolon or custom text.
- Keep “Keep paragraph breaks” ticked to preserve blank lines between paragraphs, or untick it to get one single line.
- Leave “Fix words split with a hyphen” and “Trim lines and collapse extra spaces” ticked for PDF text.
- Check the count of line breaks removed, then copy or download the result.
Remove Line Breaks features
Keeps paragraphs
Single line breaks inside a paragraph are removed while blank lines between paragraphs stay, so long documents remain readable.
Repairs PDF hyphenation
Words broken across lines with a hyphen or an invisible soft hyphen are rejoined; genuine hyphenated terms such as “Wi-Fi” or “COVID-19” keep their hyphen.
Any separator
Join lines with a space, nothing at all, a comma, a semicolon or your own text, including a tab.
Tidies spacing
Trims each line and collapses repeated spaces, so you do not end up with double spaces where lines were joined.
Handles every line ending
Windows (CRLF), Unix and macOS (LF) and old Mac (CR) line breaks are all recognised.
Why text from PDFs has broken lines
A PDF does not store paragraphs the way a word processor does. It stores lines of text placed at exact positions on the page, so when you copy from it, every visual line ends with a hard line break. Justified text in books and papers also splits long words with a hyphen at the end of a line, and some PDFs use an invisible “soft hyphen” (U+00AD) that pastes as a stray character.
This tool reverses that: it joins the lines inside each paragraph, removes the hyphen when the next line starts with a lowercase letter (a strong sign the word was split by wrapping), and keeps the hyphen when the next part starts with a capital letter or a number. A word that was genuinely hyphenated and happened to fall at a line end, such as “well-” + “known”, cannot be told apart from a split word, so check compound words in the result — or untick the hyphen option.
Which separator to choose
| Separator | Before | After | Good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| A space | line one ↵ line two | line one line two | Prose from PDFs, emails and subtitles |
| Nothing | https://exam ↵ ple.com | https://example.com | Long URLs, codes and Base64 split across lines |
| A comma and space | apple ↵ banana ↵ cherry | apple, banana, cherry | Lists for emails, tags and spreadsheet cells |
| Custom: “ OR ” | red ↵ blue | red OR blue | Search queries and filters |
Related clean-up tools
- If the text came from a scanned PDF, extract it first with PDF to Text, then paste it here.
- For stubborn spacing problems such as tabs, non-breaking spaces or zero-width characters, run the result through Remove Extra Spaces.
- To do the opposite — put each item on its own line — use Find and Replace with regular expressions and replace a comma with
\n.
Remove Line Breaks FAQ
How do I remove line breaks from text?
Paste your text into the box. Line breaks are replaced with spaces immediately, paragraphs separated by a blank line are kept, and you can copy or download the result.
How do I fix text copied from a PDF?
Paste it here with “Keep paragraph breaks”, “Fix words split with a hyphen” and “Trim lines and collapse extra spaces” ticked — the defaults. The broken lines become normal paragraphs and split words are rejoined.
How can I make all my text one single line?
Untick “Keep paragraph breaks”. Every line break, including blank lines between paragraphs, is then replaced with your chosen separator.
How do I turn a list into comma-separated values?
Choose “A comma and space” under “Replace each line break with”. A column copied from Excel or Google Sheets becomes a list such as “apple, banana, cherry”.
What is the difference between a line break and a carriage return?
Both end a line. Windows uses two characters (carriage return + line feed, CRLF), while Linux and macOS use only a line feed (LF). This tool recognises all of them, so text from any system is joined correctly.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. The line breaks are removed in your browser, and the text never leaves your device.