Online Text Tools

What online text tools are for

Most writing problems are not about ideas — they are about format. An essay is 80 words over the limit. A heading was typed with caps lock on. A list pasted from three spreadsheets now has duplicates and stray spaces. A blog title needs to become a tidy web address. Each of these takes seconds with the right tool and several frustrating minutes without one.

The text tools on this page each handle one of those jobs well. They all run in your browser, so you can paste private drafts, customer lists or coursework without it being uploaded anywhere.

Measuring text

Start with measurement when you are writing to a limit. The Word Counter shows words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and reading time together, which suits essays, articles and applications. The Character Counter focuses on characters with and without spaces, plus lines, and lets you set a limit — ideal for social posts, SMS messages and page descriptions. When you need to know how long a piece will take to read or present, the Reading Time Calculator lets you set a words-per-minute speed that matches your audience.

Different programs count slightly differently — for example, in how they treat slashes, dashes or emoji. Our guide on counting words and characters accurately explains the differences and how to leave a sensible margin.

Cleaning and formatting text

Text copied from PDFs, emails and web pages often carries hidden problems: double spaces, tabs, broken lines and non-breaking spaces. Remove Extra Spaces fixes these while keeping your paragraphs intact, and can rejoin lines that a PDF split apart. For capitalisation, the Case Converter switches between UPPERCASE, lowercase, Title Case and Sentence case, as well as camelCase, snake_case and kebab-case for code and file names.

Working with lists

Lists are where small errors multiply. Remove Duplicate Lines keeps the first occurrence of each line in its original order, with options for case-insensitive matching and trimming. The Text Sorter then puts the list in alphabetical, numerical or length order using natural sorting, so "item 2" comes before "item 10". If you just need a list upside down — newest first instead of oldest first — the Text Reverser flips line order, word order or individual characters.

A reliable order for cleaning any list is: remove extra spaces, then remove duplicates, then sort. Doing it in that order means lines that differ only by an invisible space are correctly treated as duplicates.

Creating clean URLs

When you publish a page, its title usually becomes part of its web address. The Slug Generator turns a title into a lowercase, hyphen-separated slug, converts accented letters, removes punctuation and can drop filler words. Our guide to creating a clean URL slug covers what makes a good slug and why you should avoid changing published URLs without a redirect.

Which tool should I use?