PlainSift

Trim whitespace from lines

Remove whitespace from selected edges of each line without altering spaces inside the text.

Runs in your browser. Your text is not uploaded.

Worked example

Before

  alpha  
	beta

After

alpha
beta

Whitespace at both edges is removed, while the line break between values remains.

Exactly what this changes

  • The default trims both the left and right edge using JavaScript’s Unicode-aware whitespace semantics. Each line is handled independently, so indentation and trailing spaces can be cleaned without joining lines together.
  • Internal whitespace remains unchanged. Multiple spaces between words, tabs inside a record, and spacing around embedded punctuation are not collapsed. Letter case, accents, emoji, combining characters, and line order also stay as entered.
  • Blank lines remain part of the result. A line made entirely of whitespace becomes a zero-length line when both edges are trimmed, but it is not removed unless a later Remove empty lines step does so.

Options and edge cases

  • Choose left to remove indentation only, right to remove trailing whitespace only, or both for the common cleanup. The selected side is applied consistently to every line when the pipeline runs.
  • Place trimming before duplicate comparison when visually similar values with different edge spacing should match, or use the duplicate tool’s trimmed-comparison option when the retained original spacing must stay intact.

Edge case: This operation intentionally uses the runtime’s defined whitespace set and does not remove arbitrary invisible Unicode format characters. It never normalizes Unicode composition.