Line Break Remover: Free Online Tool
FREE TOOL · NO SIGN-UP
This line break remover joins text that has been chopped into short lines, which is what you usually get when copying from PDFs, emails, old documents and terminal output. Choose to replace line breaks with spaces, keep paragraphs while joining the lines inside them, remove breaks completely or replace them with your own separator. Paste your text and get clean, flowing paragraphs or a single line instantly. It handles both Windows and Unix line endings and runs entirely in your browser.
How to Use the Line Break Remover
Paste, pick a mode, copy.
Step 1: Enter or paste your input
Paste your text into the Input text box. Typical sources are PDFs, email threads, scanned documents, subtitles, chat logs and lists from spreadsheets. Clear empties the box.
Step 2: Choose your options
Pick a Mode:
- Replace line breaks with spaces: joins everything into one continuous block, with a space where each break was. Best for single paragraphs.
- Keep paragraphs, join lines inside them: keeps blank lines between paragraphs and joins the lines within each paragraph. Best for multi-paragraph PDF text.
- Remove line breaks completely: deletes breaks without adding anything, for data like long codes or hashes split across lines.
- Replace with custom text: puts your own separator where each break was. The default is ” | “, but you can use a comma, semicolon or anything else in the Custom replacement field.
Spaces and tabs around each line break are cleaned up automatically, so you do not end up with double spaces.
Step 3: Copy, download or apply the result
The result updates as you type, with the number of line breaks removed and the input and output character counts. Click Copy or Download to save it as a text file.
Why Unwanted Line Breaks Appear
Unwanted line breaks are hard returns inserted at the end of each visual line instead of only at the end of each paragraph. They usually appear when text moves from a fixed layout into a flexible one.
Common causes:
- PDFs. A PDF stores text by position on the page. When you copy it, most viewers add a line break at the end of every printed line, so one paragraph becomes ten short lines.
- Plain-text email. Many email systems wrap plain-text messages at around 72 to 80 characters with hard breaks. Replies quoted several times get even shorter lines.
- Old documents and scans. OCR text and typewritten documents often have a break at every line.
- Terminal and log output. Command output is wrapped to the window width.
- Subtitles and captions. Each caption is split into short lines for the screen.
When this text is pasted into a website, document or form, the breaks stay. It looks ragged on wide screens, breaks into odd pieces on phones, and confuses word counts and readability checks. A line break remover fixes all of it in one step.
Removing Breaks While Keeping Paragraphs
The “Keep paragraphs” mode is the one most people need for PDFs and emails. It works in two steps:
- It splits the text into paragraphs wherever there is a blank line (two line breaks with only spaces in between).
- Inside each paragraph, it replaces every line break with a single space.
The paragraphs are then joined back together with one blank line between them.
This only works if the original text has blank lines between paragraphs. Many PDFs do, but some do not. If yours comes out as one huge block, the source had no blank lines. In that case, add a blank line by hand before each new paragraph and run it again, or use Find and Replace Text with a regex if paragraphs start with a pattern, like a number or a heading.
Headings and short lines like “Chapter 2” that are followed by a blank line stay on their own. Headings without a blank line after them will be joined to the next sentence, so check those.
CRLF vs LF: Line Endings Explained
Not every line break is the same character:
| Line ending | Characters | Used by |
|---|---|---|
| LF | \n (line feed) | Linux, macOS, most web and code tools |
| CRLF | \r\n (carriage return + line feed) | Windows, many email standards and some exports |
| CR | \r alone | Very old Mac systems |
Text copied from Windows programs or Windows-created files often has CRLF endings. Tools that only look for \n can leave stray \r characters behind, which show up as odd symbols or break scripts.
This line break remover handles both LF and CRLF, so text from Windows, Mac and Linux all comes out clean. Old CR-only files are rare today; if you have one, open it in a modern editor and save it with LF or CRLF endings first.
Developers sometimes need to convert line endings rather than remove them. Code editors like VS Code let you switch between LF and CRLF in the status bar.
Fixing Text Copied From PDFs and Emails
A quick workflow for clean PDF text:
- Copy the text from the PDF and paste it here.
- Choose Keep paragraphs, join lines inside them.
- Check for hyphenated words. PDFs often split words at line ends with a hyphen, like “informa-” and “tion”. These become “informa- tion” after joining. Search for “- ” and fix them, or use Find and Replace with regex
(\w)- (\w)and replace with$1$2, checking real hyphenated words afterwards. - Run the result through the Extra Spaces Remover to clean double spaces.
For emails, remove quote markers like “>” at the start of lines first with Find and Replace, then join the lines.
For lists you want on one line, such as keywords or emails, use custom mode with “, ” as the replacement, or the Comma Separator if you also want quotes, sorting or deduplication.
Key Features of Our Line Break Remover
- Free with no signup.
- Four modes: spaces, keep paragraphs, remove completely and custom separator.
- Custom replacement text, such as ” | “, “, ” or “;”.
- Handles LF and CRLF line endings.
- Cleans spaces around each break.
- Breaks removed count with before and after lengths.
- Copy and Download; runs in your browser.
Who Removes Line Breaks
- Students and researchers quoting from PDF papers and ebooks.
- Writers and editors fixing pasted text before publishing.
- SEOs and content managers cleaning copy for a CMS.
- Developers joining multi-line strings, keys and logs.
- Data workers turning column lists into single lines.
Pro Tips and Mistakes to Avoid
Checklist of best practices
- Use Keep paragraphs for anything with more than one paragraph.
- Fix hyphenated line-end words after joining.
- Remove email quote markers before joining.
- Use Remove completely only for data like keys or codes.
Common mistakes and quick fixes
- Words glued together. You used Remove completely on normal text. Switch to Replace with spaces.
- Everything in one block. The source has no blank lines between paragraphs. Add them, then use Keep paragraphs.
- Headings merged into text. Add a blank line after each heading first.
- Need lines numbered instead. Use the Line Numbering Tool.
Turn Broken Text Into Clean Paragraphs
Paste your text above to join broken lines in one step. Then tidy spacing with the Extra Spaces Remover, count paragraphs with the Paragraph Counter, and count lines with the Line Counter. Browse all free tools in the FHSEO Hub tools directory.
