What Is the Fastest Way To Remove Line Breaks in Text?

If you’re involved in typing up documents or have ever copied and pasted sections of text from various websites and PDFs, you may have come across some weird formatting that makes it difficult to read text.

For example, you may have received an email that you tried to copy and paste into another email. However, if it’s formatted poorly, you may end up with random breaks in the text that you have to manually fix yourself. Alternatively, you may have received text that was formatted in a narrow column where the original writer used line breaks at the end of each line to make sure it fit. When you receive text like this, it can be time-consuming and annoying to fix those issues.

What is a Line Break?

A line break is a formatting option that instantly starts text on a new line. If you’ve used any kind of word processing software, then you might know this as simply pressing enter. However, it’s a little different in some cases. For example, websites typically have to distinguish between a new paragraph (called a paragraph break) and a line break. Line breaks will immediately put text on a new line regardless of the circumstances, whereas paragraph breaks will attempt to preserve a block of text.

In addition, some programs may require you to specify between line and page breaks for a variety of other reasons. A great example of this is with PDFs. You may find yourself with poorly-formatted text if you copy from a PDF file that has a unique layout, such as blocks of text on a magazine page or something similar.

Line breaks can be used to great effect in some cases, but at other times, they can be a nuisance because it makes it difficult to copy text.

What’s the Fastest Way to Remove Line Breaks in Text?

One of the fastest ways to remove line breaks in your text is to use Text Mechanic’s text manipulation tools. With the add/remove line break tool, you can easily get rid of line breaks and take advantage of a number of different options. Here are the options:

Remove Line Breaks Only

To do this, simply enter your text in the large input box at the top of the page and click the “REMOVE ALL LINE BREAKS” button. This will automatically remove all line breaks. 

Remove Line Breaks and Replace with Text/Symbol

If you want to replace the line breaks with a certain string of text or symbol, you can do so by entering it into the box on the right. 

Add New Line Breaks

In addition, you can also choose to make new line breaks if you wish to. You can do this by inserting a line break every x number of characters, or you can define a phrase that triggers the line break before or after each occurrence. This is a great way to add line breaks to text for various uses.

How to Add Text to Text Mechanic

For Text Mechanic, you have two options of either copy and pasting text that you want to change into the box or uploading a file. The option of loading a file into the input field instead of just pasting it in is useful if you have a large file.

Use Text Mechanic for All of Your Text Manipulation Needs

Text Mechanic offers simple, single-task, browser-based text manipulation tools that will help you format text and get rid of pesky issues when copy and pasting. It can also help you format text to use in emails or the creation of documents with unique formatting. It can save you a lot of time when you’re working with lots of different documents and it’ll help you speed through any tedious tasks when fixing text-related problems. Check out the full list of text manipulation tools on Text Mechanic today.


How to Use a Find and Replace Tool

Find and replace is one of the most popular tools. This tool searches an entire document for a particular word, character or phrase and then switches it to the word, character or phrase you want. If you weren’t aware you could do this, it can be a brilliant addition to your arsenal and can really make all the difference especially when working on large amounts of text. Let’s take a closer look at this tool.

Reasons to Use Find and Replace Tool

There are many reasons to use a find and replace tool. Here are some examples:

  • Adjusting Language – Let’s say you have a document using British English but you want to change this document to be more American English. Therefore, you may want to replace certain words that are spelled differently or replace typically British words with more American words throughout the document.
  • Misspelled Words – This will be a useful tool because it allows you to fix spelling mistakes or even wrong words and phrases by replacing them quickly with the right one. 
  • Changing a Name – If you have text with someone’s name such as a contract. You can use the find and replace tool to change out there name if need be when writing out a similar or new contract. 

The find and replace tool is important to ensure consistency in your document and you will benefit from using this tool as it will make sure your work looks professional. It will also benefit you by allowing you to increase productivity by avoiding having to scan and manually change out the word, phrase, symbol or name. 

How Do You Use This Function on TextMechanic? 

If you have never used the find and replace function before on TextMechanic you may not be familiar with how to use it. In the first box, “Find this”, enter the text to be found and eventually be replaced. The second box, “Replace with” then will be the text that will be replacing the text you provided in the “Find this” box above. Last but not least, the third box will be your all of you text. Keep in mind that you can copy and paste your text into the box or upload the text if the file is large. 

Other options available:

  • Check “Global matching.” to replace all matches. Otherwise, only the first match will be replaced. A funny example of this is on the Office US when Michael Scott replaces every instance of ‘Dwight’ in his script for his movie but misses one of them because he spelt it ‘Dwigt’. Being able to replace every instance of a word or a phrase in a document is a brilliant tool because it allows you to get rid of silly mistakes quickly and without any fuss. 
  • Check “Case sensitive.” to make “Find this:” case sensitive.
  • Check “Enable regular expression” to enable regular expressions* in both find and replace fields. Regular expressions are user defined “find and replace” patterns such as find a or b to replace with c.

Text Mechanic Online Text Tools

Text Mechanic offers simple, single-task, browser-based text manipulation tools that help you fix any text-related problems. Every text tool comes with directions that make it easy to use no matter which one you need. Check out the full list of text manipulation tools on Text Mechanic today!


7 Most Popular Online Text Tools

Online text tools can be used from adjusting formats to replacing words to adding text in articles, reports, instructions, codes or script language. There are many text tools available that can make completing important projects even easier and improve productivity. So let’s talk about what the top 7 text tools are and what they are used for whether in the writing, programming, or any other world. Consider using these tools yourself in the future…

7 Most Commonly Used Online Text Tools

Add Prefix/Suffix into Line

The first text tool we are going to mention is the ability to add prefix/ suffix in bulk. This tool will insert text at the beginning and/or end of each line. For example if you were writing a list of items like pieces of fruit you might want to add the prefix ‘fruit’ into the text of each line so that each item on the list has this before it. You would go from this: 

  • Apple 
  • Banana
  • Orange 

To this: 

  • Fruit apple 
  • Fruit banana 
  • Fruit orange 

Why is this useful? This text tool is very useful especially for programmers that need to add prefix and suffix texts throughout their codes. They are able to add text in bulk without having to go line by line and manually add them in. This saves a lot of time. Additionally, manually adding text is more error prone then using a reliable text tool as you are more likely to accidentally skip a line. When it comes to programming or writing script language, coding has to be perfect. If not, the code won’t work. 

Add/Remove Line Breaks

The second text tool is adding or removing line breaks from your text. If paragraphs are too spaced out, removing line breaks in certain areas can make the paragraphs easier to read. On the other hand, many people are put off when they see a huge paragraph of text so by using this text tool you will be able to break it up and make it look better and flow in a more sensible way. 

When is this tool helpful? When you copy text from a PDF, email, social media post or another source, the formatting can be distorted with strange line breaks and spacing. Therefore, this tool can be very helpful in removing any unnecessary line breaks to create text easy to read. 

Count Characters, Words, Lines

This text tool scans, tracks and counts all words, characters and lines. Keep in mind, character count includes white spaces unless you specify otherwise. While word count does not count white space but uses white space to determine when a word starts or ends. Lastly, this tool counts all the number of lines and line breaks.

Why is this tool helpful? For a copywriter, they may have a specific word count to work towards for a piece of work so being able to keep track of this will help. For an author, they might want to reach a certain word range such as 65,000 – 75,000 words to keep up with the standard of other books in their industry. By keeping track of word count a writer is able to see where they need to add more or less detail. 

Delimited Column Extractor

The next text tool we want to talk about is the delimited column extractor. This tool can split a list by comma, space or any delimiter. When you choose a delimiter and column number, it will grab your chosen column and delete the others. Remember, you can separate any column as long as each column follows the same pattern such as using the same delimiter. For example, the delimited column extractor might see a piece of text that has the following: 

  • Small. Cat. Male 
  • Big. Dog. Female 
  • Small. Rabbit. Female 

If you were to want the second column of text only you would say that ‘.’ Is the delimiter and that you want column 2. This will output this: 

  • Cat
  • Dog
  • Rabbit 

How can this tool be helpful? This tool can come in handy if you work with spreadsheets often as it can efficiently unmerge cells and extract information from lists. 

Find and Replace Text

Find and replace online tools will automatically locate one word and switch it for another. Simply, enter “find this” and “replace this” fields and the word will be changed to that word throughout the block of text 

How is this helpful? It’s very useful when you need to edit a large amount of text. Find and replace text can be used to fix a mistake such as a misspelled word. A great example of this would be if you have a long piece of work and have misspelled something like ‘necessary’. You can simply add the text into your find and replace and you will find all instances of this word in the piece and replace it with the correct spelling. 

Remove Duplicate Lines

This online text tool will remove and delete all duplicate lines within your text or list.

When can this tool be helpful? This tool can be especially useful when you have large lists and need to ensure there are no duplicates. For example, you combine several email lists. You can use this tool to search the list and delete any duplicate names or emails.

Line Combination Generator

The line combination generator will produce different combinations for a set of words you input. 

When is this tool useful? This tool can be extremely helpful for programmers who need to find all combinations/permutations of certain data.

Text Mechanic Online Text Tools

Text Mechanic offers simple, single-task, browser-based text manipulation tools that help you fix any text-related problems. Every text tool comes with directions that make it easy to use no matter which one you need. Check out the full list of text manipulation tools on Text Mechanic today!