Is the Clipboard Cleaner free?
Yes. This tool is free to use with no sign-up, and it runs entirely in your browser.
Does it upload my text?
No. Cleaning happens locally in your browser, so the text you paste never leaves your device.
Does it read my clipboard automatically?
No. Clipboard access is explicit and only happens when you click the read button, so nothing is read without your action.
Does it handle images or rich clipboard formats?
No. The first version is text-only, so it cleans plain text rather than images or formatted clipboard content.
What kinds of hidden characters does it remove?
It removes invisible Unicode such as zero-width marks, normalizes smart punctuation and odd spaces, and fixes inconsistent line endings.
Does the text leave my browser?
No. Every step is a string transformation in the page, so nothing is uploaded and nothing is logged. This is worth knowing given what people paste into a clipboard cleaner: half-written emails, internal notes and credentials that were copied by accident.
Why did my text have invisible characters in the first place?
Copying from a website, a PDF, a Word document or a chat app brings along whatever the source used for layout. Zero-width joiners and non-breaking spaces are added by editors and CMSs to control wrapping, and the byte-order mark is added by some text editors when saving. They are invisible on screen and highly visible to a parser.
Why does the tool not read my clipboard automatically?
Because reading a user's clipboard without a deliberate action is exactly the behaviour a clipboard tool should not have. The read only happens when you click the button, and the browser gates it behind a permission prompt. Firefox does not offer the capability to web pages at all, so paste with the keyboard there.
What does NFKC normalization change?
It rewrites compatibility characters into their standard forms: full-width Latin letters become normal ones, ligature characters are decomposed, and superscript digits become normal digits. It is what turns text that looks subtly wrong into text a search box will actually match.
Will it break my code snippet?
Probably, and deliberately so. Runs of two or more spaces or tabs are collapsed to a single space, and each line is trimmed, so indentation is lost. It also converts curly quotes to straight ones, which is what you want for code, but the whitespace handling makes it unsuitable for anything indentation-sensitive such as Python or YAML.
How is this different from the Unicode Cleaner and Smart Quotes Cleaner?
Those two each do one of these steps. This page runs the whole pipeline in one pass: invisible Unicode, then smart punctuation, then line endings, then whitespace. Use the narrow tools when you want exactly one transformation and nothing else.