How-to guides
Case-by-case walkthroughs of everyday problems, such as text copied from a PDF, data pasted from Excel or duplicate names in a list, and the order of steps that fixes each one.
01How to Fix Broken Line Breaks in Text Copied from a PDFWhy text copied from a PDF breaks mid-sentence, and how to repair line breaks, rejoin hyphenated words and remove page numbers and headers, with examples.02Cleaning Up Data Pasted from Excel or Google SheetsHow a table copied from Excel or Google Sheets becomes tabs and line breaks, and how to clean NBSP, stray spaces and empty rows or turn tabs into commas.03How to Remove Duplicates from Name and Email Lists and Sort ThemRemove repeated names and emails after merging lists and sort them alphabetically. Learn why spacing or case hides duplicates and how to keep sign-up order.04Converting Web Pages and HTML Source to Plain TextStrip tags from HTML source while keeping paragraphs and line breaks: remove script and style, decode entities like & and turn tables into tabs.05Find and Replace with Regex: A Collection of Practical Patterns13 JavaScript regex find-and-replace patterns for text cleanup: reformat dates, mask phone numbers, drop parenthesized text and use $1 group references.06Cleaning Up Full-Width, Half-Width and Invisible CharactersFind and fix full-width characters, NBSP, zero-width spaces, BOM and decomposed Korean (NFD), the hidden reasons searches and VLOOKUPs fail.07Turning a List into an SQL IN Clause, JSON Array, Markdown or HTML ListTurn a one-per-line list into an SQL IN clause, JSON array, Markdown or HTML list: wrap values in quotes, join with commas and escape quotes safely.