TextWash

This page finds U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE and converts each one to a regular space. The sample below contains several — hover the orange dots in the x-ray. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

Input

X-ray hover a highlight for details

Cleaned output copied ✓

Cleaning rules

What is U+00A0 (non-breaking space)?

A space that looks identical to a normal space but tells layout engines "don't wrap the line here". It's the character behind HTML's  . Visually indistinguishable from U+0020 — and to every parser, completely different.

Where it comes from

Copying from web pages (any   becomes U+00A0 on your clipboard), Word and Google Docs (inserted automatically around some punctuation), Excel and Google Sheets exports, and French-style typography which puts one before : ; ! ?.

What it breaks

Pasted shell commands fail with command not found because the shell sees apt install as one giant argument. Python reports SyntaxError: invalid non-printable character U+00A0. CSV columns won't line up, spreadsheet VLOOKUP/MATCH can't find values that are visibly there, and search-and-replace on a normal space misses every one of them.

How to find it in your editor

In VS Code, regex-search \u00a0. On the command line: grep -rP '\x{00A0}' . — or paste the text above: every exotic space is marked with a dot and converted to a plain space in the output.