What is the ▎ character at the start of my lines?

It's a box-drawing 'left one-eighth block' glyph (or similar vertical bar) that ChatGPT's web UI, terminals, and some markdown viewers use to draw the left rail of a quote or code block. When you copy the rendered text, the rail comes along as a real character on every line. This tool strips those leading bars while keeping your actual text.

Why is there [1m or [22m in my pasted text?

Those are ANSI SGR codes — terminal instructions for bold, color, and reset. Normally an invisible ESC byte precedes them, but when text is copied out of a terminal that byte is often dropped, leaving the bracket codes visible as [1m, [0m, [22m, [0;32m, and so on. The 'strip terminal color codes' toggle removes both the full escape sequences and these orphaned codes.

How does duplicate-paragraph removal work?

It splits your text on blank lines into blocks, then drops any block whose text is identical to the block immediately before it. This catches the common case where the same passage was pasted or rendered twice in a row. It only removes back-to-back duplicates, so unrelated repeated phrasing elsewhere in the document is left alone.

What counts as an invisible character?

Zero-width spaces and joiners (U+200B–U+200D, U+FEFF, U+2060), soft hyphens, and Mongolian vowel separators are deleted. Non-breaking spaces (U+00A0), narrow and thin spaces, and the ideographic space (U+3000) are converted to a normal space so word wrapping and search behave normally.

Is my text sent to a server?

No. All cleaning runs locally in your browser with regular expressions. Your text never leaves your device, and nothing is stored.

Clean Pasted Text

The fix for text that copied wrong. Paste anything that picked up junk on the way to your clipboard and get clean plain text back: the vertical quote bars (▎ │ ┃) ChatGPT and terminals prepend to quoted lines, leftover ANSI color codes like [1m and [22m, curly smart quotes, em/en dashes, ellipsis characters, zero-width and non-breaking spaces, and paragraphs that got duplicated when the source rendered the same block twice. Six independent toggles, live before/after preview, and a per-fix change count. Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

Strip quote-bar glyphs (▎ │ ┃)Removes the vertical bars ChatGPT and terminals prepend to quoted lines.Strip terminal color codes ([1m, [0m)Removes ANSI escape sequences and leftover [22m-style codes.Remove invisible & non-breaking spacesDeletes zero-width chars; converts NBSP and exotic spaces to plain spaces.Normalize smart quotes, dashes, ellipsisCurly quotes → straight, em/en dash → hyphen, … → ...Remove duplicated paragraphsDrops a block that repeats the one right before it — the paste-twice bug.Tidy whitespace & blank linesTrims trailing spaces, collapses double spaces and extra blank lines.

Paste messy text0 / 100,000

Clean output

quote bars

color codes

smart quotes

dashes

invisibles

dup blocks

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ▎ character at the start of my lines?: It's a box-drawing 'left one-eighth block' glyph (or similar vertical bar) that ChatGPT's web UI, terminals, and some markdown viewers use to draw the left rail of a quote or code block. When you copy the rendered text, the rail comes along as a real character on every line. This tool strips those leading bars while keeping your actual text.
Why is there [1m or [22m in my pasted text?: Those are ANSI SGR codes — terminal instructions for bold, color, and reset. Normally an invisible ESC byte precedes them, but when text is copied out of a terminal that byte is often dropped, leaving the bracket codes visible as [1m, [0m, [22m, [0;32m, and so on. The 'strip terminal color codes' toggle removes both the full escape sequences and these orphaned codes.
How does duplicate-paragraph removal work?: It splits your text on blank lines into blocks, then drops any block whose text is identical to the block immediately before it. This catches the common case where the same passage was pasted or rendered twice in a row. It only removes back-to-back duplicates, so unrelated repeated phrasing elsewhere in the document is left alone.
What counts as an invisible character?: Zero-width spaces and joiners (U+200B–U+200D, U+FEFF, U+2060), soft hyphens, and Mongolian vowel separators are deleted. Non-breaking spaces (U+00A0), narrow and thin spaces, and the ideographic space (U+3000) are converted to a normal space so word wrapping and search behave normally.
Is my text sent to a server?: No. All cleaning runs locally in your browser with regular expressions. Your text never leaves your device, and nothing is stored.

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About Clean Pasted Text

Strip quote-bar glyphs (▎ │), terminal color codes ([1m, [22m), smart quotes, invisible/non-breaking spaces, and duplicated paragraphs from text pasted out of ChatGPT, terminals, or PDFs. This tool runs entirely in your browser, so your content is not sent to a server. MarkdownMe provides free, fast, and reliable Markdown tools for developers, writers, and anyone who works with Markdown.