Text Cleaner

Each cleaning rule targets a specific kind of mess and can be toggled independently. Stripping HTML removes tags like <p> or <span> using pattern matching rather than a full HTML parser, so it works well on typical pasted markup but can leave fragments behind if the HTML is malformed or deeply nested. Removing punctuation strips characters like periods, commas and quotation marks, which also affects contractions since the apostrophe in don't or it's counts as punctuation. Removing numbers strips digit characters, and collapsing spaces and empty lines tidies up whatever whitespace is left once the other rules have run.

This combination is useful whenever a piece of text needs to be reduced to plain, uniform prose: pulling an article out of a webpage where the copy carries invisible formatting tags, preparing text for word-frequency or keyword analysis where punctuation and numbers are just noise, or stripping rich formatting before pasting content into a plain-text field like a CMS body, forum post, or database import.

One thing to check afterward is whether removing punctuation changed anything you wanted to keep, since it removes it indiscriminately, and whether the HTML stripping fully cleared out any HTML entities like &amp; or &nbsp;, since a simple tag stripper focuses on removing tags rather than decoding entities.