Remove Line Breaks
Join hard-wrapped lines into flowing text, keep paragraph breaks and repair words split with a hyphen at the end of a line.
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Tool guide
What this tool does
Remove Line Breaks turns text with a break at the end of every line, typically copied from a PDF, an email or a terminal, back into normal paragraphs. You choose what replaces each break, whether blank lines between paragraphs survive, and whether words hyphenated across lines are rejoined.
Text copied out of a PDF, a plain-text email or a console window usually carries a hard line break wherever the original layout wrapped. Pasted into a document, a web form or a translation tool, it appears as a ragged column of short lines, and words that were split with a hyphen at the margin stay broken in two.
This tool normalises Windows (CRLF), old Mac (CR) and Unix (LF) line endings first, then joins the lines of each paragraph with the replacement you pick. A blank line is treated as a paragraph boundary, so structure survives while the wrapping disappears. The hyphen repair only fires when a letter, a hyphen and a line break are followed by a lowercase letter, which keeps a name such as “Jean-Paul” intact when it is split across two lines. Everything runs in your browser.
How to use Remove Line Breaks
- Paste the wrapped text into the input box or click Sample to load an example copied from a PDF.
- Pick what to put in place of each break under “Replace line breaks with”: a space, nothing, or custom text such as a comma.
- Leave “Keep paragraph breaks (blank lines)” on to preserve paragraphs, or switch it off to produce one continuous block.
- Keep “Rejoin words hyphenated at line ends” on for PDF text so that “exam-” plus “ple” becomes “example”.
- Use “Trim spaces around each line” and “Collapse repeated spaces” to tidy indentation left by the source layout.
- Copy or download the joined text; compare the “Line breaks before” and “after” counts to confirm the result.
Tips for better results
- Choose “Custom text” with a value of “, ” to turn a column of names into a single comma-separated line.
- Type \t into the custom replacement to join lines with tabs, which pastes neatly into one spreadsheet row.
- If your source has no blank lines between paragraphs, the whole text becomes one paragraph; add a blank line wherever you want a split first.
- Run poetry, addresses and code through with paragraph mode on and check the output, because their line breaks carry meaning.
Common use cases
- Cleaning a quotation copied from a research paper PDF before pasting it into an essay.
- Unwrapping a plain-text email that was hard-wrapped at 72 characters.
- Preparing subtitles or transcripts as continuous text for a translation tool.
- Converting a vertical list of keywords into one line separated by commas.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Switching off hyphen repair for PDF text and ending up with fragments such as “docu- ment”.
- Joining with nothing between lines, which glues the last word of one line to the first word of the next.
- Running Markdown or code through the tool; lists, headings and indentation depend on their line breaks.
Frequently asked questions
Why does text from a PDF have a break on every line?
PDF files store text positioned line by line for printing rather than as flowing paragraphs. When you copy it, most viewers insert a line break at the end of each visual line, which is exactly what this tool removes.
Will genuine hyphenated words lose their hyphen?
Only when the hyphen sits at the very end of a line and the next line starts with a lowercase letter. A compound such as “well-known” in the middle of a line is never touched, and a hyphen followed by a capital letter is kept.
Does it handle Windows line endings?
Yes. Carriage return plus line feed (CRLF), lone carriage returns and lone line feeds are all recognised and treated the same way, so files from any operating system work.
How is a paragraph detected?
Any line that is empty or contains only spaces or tabs marks a paragraph boundary. Lines between two boundaries are joined into one paragraph, and paragraphs are separated by a single blank line in the output.
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