Remove Empty Lines
Remove all blank or empty lines from your text.
💡 Common Use Cases
- Delete blank lines from copied PDF or email text
- Compact a list after deleting items from the middle
- Clean whitespace-only lines out of code blocks
- Tighten a keyword list before importing it
- Remove the gaps left by exporting from a spreadsheet
Strip every blank line out of your text in one click
Blank lines accumulate in text from every direction. Copy-paste from a PDF or website almost always introduces extra spacing. A spreadsheet column with gaps exports as a list with blank entries. Code or configuration files have empty lines as visual separators. Most of the time those blank lines are visual noise, useful while writing but pure clutter when you need to process the list. This Remove Empty Lines tool deletes them in a single pass.
How to use it
Drop your copy-pasted document, code block, or list into the editor. Click Remove Empty Lines. The output is the same content with every empty or whitespace-only line stripped. Lines that contain only spaces, tabs, or other invisible characters are treated as empty by default — the tool considers a line "empty" if it has nothing visible on it.
What counts as "empty"
The tool considers a line empty if it contains no visible characters. This includes:
- Truly empty lines with nothing between two consecutive newlines
- Lines containing only space characters
- Lines containing only tab characters
- Lines containing other whitespace like non-breaking spaces or zero-width characters
If a line has even one visible character — a single letter, digit, or punctuation mark — it is kept. This is the safe default for most use cases.
Common scenarios
Cleaning up after PDF copy-paste. PDFs are notorious for producing text with blank lines scattered through it — usually one blank line for every actual line of source text, because the PDF generator treats line spacing as part of the layout. Stripping the blank lines restores normal paragraph structure.
Preparing data for import. Database imports, API uploads, and most data-processing pipelines treat each non-empty line as a separate record. Blank lines in the input often produce empty rows in the output, which then need to be cleaned up downstream. Stripping them upstream is cleaner.
Tidying email lists. A user-pasted email list often arrives with double-spacing or with blank lines between entries. Removing them produces a clean newline-separated list ready for any bulk-email tool.
Cleaning configuration files. When you are diffing two config files, blank lines used for readability create noise. Stripping them on both sides isolates the lines that actually contain settings.
Compressing logs. Some log formats include blank lines between entries. Stripping them produces a denser log that is easier to scan visually.
Spreadsheet column cleanup. When you paste a column from a spreadsheet, every gap in the column becomes a blank line in the text. Removing those gives you a continuous list of just the populated cells.
Source code minification. While dedicated minifiers do more, simply stripping blank lines is sometimes enough to reduce file size meaningfully for HTML, CSS, or quick code-share scenarios.
Tips and combinations
If you want to keep paragraphs separated but collapse multiple blank lines into a single one (rather than removing all of them), that is a different operation — use Remove Extra Spaces in "collapse blank lines" mode instead.
If you also want leading and trailing whitespace stripped from each remaining line, combine this tool with Remove Extra Spaces. Run remove-empty first, then remove extra spaces, and you have a fully normalised list.
If your "blank" lines contain a single character that you want to treat as empty (like a dash or a placeholder), use Find & Replace first to remove that character, then run this tool.
Privacy
The operation is a simple JavaScript filter over an array of lines, running entirely in your browser. No upload, no server, no logging. Your text never leaves your device. Safe for any content — proprietary, confidential, sensitive, or just personal notes.
If you process text from external sources regularly, this is one of those tools you will reach for several times a week without thinking about it.