Text cleaner

Flattens curly quotes and em dashes to plain ASCII, collapses runs of whitespace, strips zero-width characters and removes blank lines — the whole set of things that go wrong when text moves between applications.

The invisible characters are the ones that actually cause trouble. Text copied from a website often carries zero-width spaces, non-breaking spaces and directional marks that look like nothing and break string comparisons, CSV imports and search. A field that refuses to match a value you can see is identical is almost always this. Smart quotes are the other frequent culprit: they are different codepoints from the straight ones, so a smart apostrophe in a config file, a CSV or a piece of code is a syntax error that looks perfectly fine on screen.