How to Clean Pasted Text: Removing Combining Marks, Accents and Full-Width Characters

Text rarely arrives clean. A caption copied from social media carries stacked marks, a name from a spreadsheet has accents your system chokes on, and a line pasted from a Japanese site is made of wide characters that do not match anything you type. The BetterUtils Remove Text Formatting tool tidies up several of these problems in one click. It is also a tool people misunderstand, because the word formatting suggests it removes everything. This guide explains exactly what it does, what it does not do, and how to use it with confidence.

What the Tool Does Under the Hood

The tool applies two cleanups to the text you paste. First, it breaks each character into its base letter and any attached marks, then it deletes the combining marks in the common range used for accents and decorative overlays. Second, it converts full-width characters, the wide letters and punctuation used in East Asian typesetting, into their ordinary equivalents. Everything runs in your browser, and the result appears below the input box with a copy button.

Combining Marks: Zalgo, Strikethrough and Underlines

Many decorative effects are built by attaching extra marks to normal letters. That includes the stacked marks of glitch text, the line through each letter in Unicode strikethrough, and the underlines produced by some generators. Because the base letters stay underneath, removing the marks brings the readable text back. This makes the tool a quick way to recover plain text from a styled caption, a user name, or a decorated message you were sent.

Accents Go Too

The same step that removes decorative marks also removes ordinary accents. A word like cafe with an accent on the final letter comes back as plain cafe, and a name with a tilde or umlaut loses it. This can be exactly what you need, for example when you want a simplified version for a username or a filename. It can also be a surprise if you only wanted to remove a decoration from a name written in a language that uses accents. Always read the result before you use it, especially for names and words in other languages.

Full-Width Characters Become Normal Characters

Full-width letters and punctuation take up the space of two characters and look spaced out in Latin text. The tool maps them back to their regular counterparts, so wide text becomes ordinary text. This is useful for text copied from some East Asian websites, for form fields that reject wide characters, and for matching strings in a spreadsheet where wide and normal versions look similar but are not equal.

What the Tool Does Not Change

It is just as important to know the limits. The tool does not convert styled alphabets, like script, bold or double struck letters, back into plain letters. Those are different characters, not plain letters with a mark on top, so they pass through unchanged. It also does not strip every symbol, and emojis are left in place. If your text came from a fancy text generator, the combining style effects can be removed with this tool, but the styled letter shapes themselves cannot. In that case, retype the words or use the original plain version.

Quick reference: what happens to different kinds of text
Kind of text	Result
Stacked glitch marks	Marks removed, base letters remain
Unicode strikethrough or underline marks	Marks removed, base letters remain
Accented letters	Accents removed
Full-width letters and punctuation	Converted to normal characters
Styled alphabets like script or bold	Unchanged
Emojis and most symbols	Unchanged

A Practical Cleaning Workflow

A reliable routine keeps you out of trouble when you are cleaning text for something that matters.

Paste the text into the input box and run the cleanup.
Compare the output with the original, especially names, brands and non-English words.
If accents were important, restore them manually or keep the original.
Copy the clean text and paste it into the destination.
Use a case converter or word counter afterwards if you need to adjust the text further.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will this turn fancy script or bold letters back into normal letters?

No. Those styles use entirely different characters, so they are not removed by stripping marks. Retype the text or use the plain original.

Why did my accented letters lose their accents?

Accents are combining marks too, so the same cleanup that removes decoration removes them. Restore them by hand if they matter.

Does the text get sent to a server?

The cleanup runs in your browser using the text you paste. See the privacy policy for what the site collects in general.

Conclusion

Remove Text Formatting is best understood as a mark and width cleaner: it strips stacked and attached marks, drops accents, and normalizes wide characters. It is not a magic eraser for every kind of styled text. Know what it changes, check the output, and keep the original when accuracy matters. Paste your next messy line into the tool and see what comes back.