DataScrub

Clean messy text lists & export spreadsheet-ready CSV

Paste or drop any unformatted block of text. DataScrub strips invisible characters, collapses stray whitespace, removes duplicate rows, and detects whether your data is separated by tabs, commas, pipes or semicolons — then hands you a clean CSV. Everything runs locally in your browser; no upload, no server.

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How to clean unformatted text lists

Unformatted text arrives from everywhere: a PDF invoice, an email signature block, a web page table, an exported report from legacy software. It looks fine on screen, but underneath it is riddled with problems a spreadsheet cannot forgive — non-breaking spaces copied out of HTML, zero-width joiners pasted from messaging apps, trailing tabs, doubled delimiters, and the same row repeated four times because three people sent you the same contact. Cleaning that by hand in Excel means a chain of nested TRIM, CLEAN and SUBSTITUTE formulas that you rebuild from scratch every single time. A dedicated scrubbing pass is faster and repeatable: normalise the invisible characters first, collapse the whitespace, drop the duplicates, and only then decide how the columns should split.

Why hidden characters break spreadsheet formulas

A lookup fails while the value is visibly sitting right there in the column — that is the classic symptom. VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP match on exact character sequences, so "Smith" and "Smith\u00A0" are two different strings even though they render identically. A non-breaking space (U+00A0) survives TRIM, because TRIM only removes ordinary spaces. A byte-order mark at the start of a file becomes a phantom character welded onto your first header, so SUM over that column silently returns zero. Numbers pasted with thin spaces as thousands separators are read as text and quietly excluded from totals. Because none of these characters are visible, the resulting errors do not look like errors at all — they are wrong answers that look entirely plausible, which is considerably more dangerous than a loud #N/A.

Step-by-step instructions

  1. Load your data. Paste it into the box above, or drag a .txt, .csv or .tsv file straight onto it.
  2. Strip hidden characters. Removes control codes, zero-width characters and byte-order marks, converts curly quotes and en-dashes to plain ASCII, turns non-breaking spaces into real spaces, and collapses runs of spaces down to one.
  3. Remove duplicate lines. Keeps the first occurrence of each line in its original order and reports exactly how many it discarded.
  4. Detect & build table. Scores tab, comma, pipe and semicolon candidates for consistency across your rows, picks the winner, and parses it with full quoted-field support.
  5. Sort, filter, verify. Click any column header to sort; type in the filter box to narrow rows. Confirm the columns landed where you expect them.
  6. Download the CSV. Fields containing commas, quotes or newlines are escaped to RFC 4180. Leave Excel-safe export ticked if you plan to open the file in Excel.

DataScrub processes everything inside your browser tab using JavaScript. Your data is never transmitted, logged or stored, which makes it safe for contact lists, internal exports and other material you would not want to paste into an online converter.