Text Tools

Count, compare, preview, transform, and refine text directly in your browser.

Counting text, and why two counters disagree

Word counts matter when something else enforces them: a 500-word application answer, a meta description that has to fit, an essay with a hard ceiling, a script timed against a read-aloud rate. Two counters here answer slightly different questions, which is why both exist.

One reports words, characters, and sentences, so it suits prose where sentence length is part of the edit. The other reports lines and characters-excluding-whitespace alongside the word count, which is what you want for lists, code comments, and fields with a strict character budget.

Reading time is an estimate derived from the word count, not a measurement. Treat it as a rough signal for pacing rather than a promise about any particular reader.

Cleaning up text that came from somewhere else

Text pasted out of a PDF, an email client, or a spreadsheet arrives damaged in predictable ways: line breaks in the middle of sentences, double spaces after full stops, trailing whitespace on every line, blank lines between paragraphs, and line endings from a different operating system.

Fixing that by hand is the wrong use of an afternoon. A cleaning pass handles trimming, collapsing runs of spaces, normalizing line endings, and dropping empty lines in one step, which is usually enough to make the text usable again.

Lists have their own failure mode: the same entry appearing more than once. Deduplication tools differ in what they treat as a separator, so a newline-delimited list of email addresses and a comma-delimited list of tags are handled by different tools even though the underlying idea is identical. Sorting and deduplicating together is often the fastest way to see what a messy list actually contains.

Comparing versions and previewing Markdown

When two copies of a document have drifted apart and nobody tracked the changes, reading both side by side rarely finds every edit. A line-level comparison marks what was added, removed, and left alone, which turns a proofreading task into a review of a short list.

Markdown has the opposite problem: the source is readable but you cannot tell what it will look like until something renders it. A live preview shows the rendered result as you type, and because the HTML is sanitized before display, pasting Markdown from an untrusted source does not execute anything.

Both run in the page, so contract redlines and unpublished drafts stay on your device instead of passing through someone else's server. Editing rarely stops at one step either, and the complete directory is the fastest way to find the next one, whether that is a URL slug for the headline or a character count for the meta description.

Explore other categories

Find more private tools for files, text, development, and everyday work.