Why do curly quotes break code but not regular writing?

Programming languages define string literals using the plain ASCII straight-quote characters (" and '); a curly “smart” quote is a completely different Unicode character that the language's syntax doesn't recognize as a string delimiter, causing a syntax error. Word processors substitute curly quotes automatically for readability in prose, which is fine for reading but breaks when that same text is pasted into code.

Does this remove all formatting, or just some of it?

All of it — this tool strips every HTML tag and formatting artifact, converting the input to fully plain text with no bold, italics, links, or other markup preserved. If you need to keep some formatting, this isn't the right tool for that partial-preservation case.

What are zero-width characters and why would they be in my pasted text?

They're invisible Unicode characters (like a zero-width space) that some web pages and editors insert for line-wrap hinting or other internal formatting reasons. They don't display visually but can cause a search for an exact phrase to silently fail, or slightly inflate a character count, since the tool sees a character where you see nothing. This cleaner strips them out.

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Text Cleaner (Strip Formatting & HTML)

Strips HTML tags, smart quotes, and Word/Google-Docs formatting artifacts specifically.

This tool runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type or paste here is ever sent to a server — see how the calculations work.

Rich text copied from a word processor, web page, or email client carries invisible formatting baggage that breaks when pasted into a plain-text field: HTML tags, "smart" curly quotes, non-standard dashes, and Microsoft-specific formatting artifacts. This tool strips all of that down to clean plain text, targeting the exact mess each of those sources tends to leave behind.

The cleaned plain text appears here as you paste.

The specific artifacts this targets

HTML tags (anything between angle brackets, like <p>, <span style="...">, <b>) are stripped entirely, leaving only the visible text content. This handles the common case of pasting from a web page or rich-text email into a plain-text CMS field or code editor where literal tag markup would otherwise show up as garbage on the page.

"Smart" typographic quotes — the curly “ ” and ‘ ’ characters that Word and most modern editors substitute automatically for straight quotes as you type — are converted back to plain straight quotes (" and '). This matters because straight quotes are what most code, markdown, and plain-text contexts expect; curly quotes pasted into code (like a string literal) will often cause a syntax error, since they're a different character than the ASCII quote mark the language expects.

Word and Google Docs also frequently insert an em dash (—) or en dash (–) automatically in place of a typed double-hyphen (--) or single hyphen with spaces, plus non-breaking spaces around certain punctuation. This tool normalizes dashes to a standard hyphen-minus where appropriate and converts non-breaking spaces to regular spaces (the same fix /remove-extra-spaces/ applies, included here since it's part of the same "rich paste" cleanup problem).

Zero-width characters (invisible Unicode characters sometimes inserted by web page copy-paste, like zero-width spaces or joiners used for line-wrap hinting) are also stripped, since they're invisible but can silently break exact-match search/replace or string-length calculations downstream.

Who uses this

Pasting a paragraph copied from a web article into a plain-text CMS field or markdown file without carrying over stray HTML markup.
Fixing curly quotes that would break a code string literal or a markdown file's expected plain-quote formatting.
Cleaning up text copied from Word or Google Docs before pasting into an email or plain-text document that shouldn't carry Word's autoformatting artifacts.

Edge cases to know about

If you actually need to preserve some HTML formatting (like bold or italic tags) rather than strip it entirely, this tool isn't the right one — it removes all markup, converting rich text to fully plain text with no formatting retained.
Converting curly quotes to straight quotes is a one-way, lossy operation for text that uses both single quotes and apostrophes in the curly style — the tool applies a best-effort rule to tell an opening quote from an apostrophe based on context, but unusual sentence structures can occasionally produce a wrong guess.
Some legitimate uses of an em dash (as genuine punctuation, not a Word autoformat artifact) will also get normalized to a hyphen by this tool if you have dash-normalization turned on — toggle that option off if you want to preserve intentional em dashes in your copy while still cleaning HTML and quotes.

Related tools

FAQ

Why do curly quotes break code but not regular writing?: Programming languages define string literals using the plain ASCII straight-quote characters (" and '); a curly “smart” quote is a completely different Unicode character that the language's syntax doesn't recognize as a string delimiter, causing a syntax error. Word processors substitute curly quotes automatically for readability in prose, which is fine for reading but breaks when that same text is pasted into code.
Does this remove all formatting, or just some of it?: All of it — this tool strips every HTML tag and formatting artifact, converting the input to fully plain text with no bold, italics, links, or other markup preserved. If you need to keep some formatting, this isn't the right tool for that partial-preservation case.
What are zero-width characters and why would they be in my pasted text?: They're invisible Unicode characters (like a zero-width space) that some web pages and editors insert for line-wrap hinting or other internal formatting reasons. They don't display visually but can cause a search for an exact phrase to silently fail, or slightly inflate a character count, since the tool sees a character where you see nothing. This cleaner strips them out.