📝 Text Tools

Text is the format everything passes through on its way somewhere else. It gets copied out of PDFs, pasted between applications, exported from databases and merged from multiple sources — and each of those steps leaves marks. A line break at the end of every visual line. Duplicated rows from a merge. Capitalisation that no longer matches your house style. These tools handle the repair work.

What usually goes wrong

Most text problems are invisible on screen, which is what makes them frustrating. Two lines that look identical fail to deduplicate because one ends in a space. A search finds nothing because the apostrophe is a typographic ' rather than a straight '. A file imports badly because it uses Windows \r\n line endings and the parser expected Unix \n. When something behaves inexplicably, an invisible character is the first thing to suspect.

Working in the right order

Cleanup steps interact, so sequence matters. Normalise line endings and trim whitespace before deduplicating, or trailing spaces will hide real duplicates. Deduplicate before sorting, since sorting a list with duplicates just groups them together. And convert case last, because case conversion is lossy — once "iPhone" becomes "IPHONE", nothing records which letters were originally capitalised.

Counting is a convention, not a measurement

Word counts vary between tools by a percent or two, because hyphenated compounds, numerals and contractions are each handled differently. Character counts are far more stable, which is why every platform with a hard limit — 280 characters on Twitter/X, 160 for a single SMS segment — measures those instead. If an exact figure decides whether your submission is accepted, check it against the software the assessor will use.