A Developer's Guide to the Whitespace Normalizer

The Whitespace Normalizer is a text-cleaning utility designed to standardize inconsistent whitespace in your text. It's perfect for cleaning up user-submitted content, formatting code comments, or preparing text for processing.

Features

• Comprehensive Cleaning Options: You can choose any combination of the following operations:
  • Trim Leading/Trailing Spaces: Removes all spaces and tabs from the beginning and end of every line.
  • Collapse Multiple Spaces: Replaces any sequence of two or more spaces with a single space.
  • Convert Tabs to Spaces: Replaces all tab characters (\t) with a specified number of spaces.
• Customizable Tab Width: When converting tabs to spaces, you can set exactly how many spaces each tab should become.
• Real-time Preview: The "Normalized Output" text area updates instantly as you type or change the settings, showing you exactly what the result will be.
• Show Invisibles: A special toggle allows you to visualize all whitespace characters. Spaces are shown as ·, and tabs are shown as →, making it easy to see exactly what's being changed.
• Apply to Input: Once you're happy with the result, you can click "Apply to Input" to replace the original text with the normalized version for further editing.

How to Use

1. Paste Your Text: Enter the text you want to clean into the "Input" text area.
2. Configure Options: Use the switches at the bottom to enable or disable the different normalization rules. If you're converting tabs, set your desired tab width.
3. View the Result: The "Normalized Output" area will show the cleaned-up text in real-time.
4. (Optional) Show Invisibles: Click the "Show Invisibles" button to visualize the whitespace in both the input and output.
5. Copy or Apply:
   • Click "Copy Result" to grab the cleaned text.
   • Click "Apply to Input" to update the input field with the normalized text.