Use the free Remove Empty Lines below: your data never leaves your browser — all work happens on your device, and nothing is uploaded to any server.
Where blank lines come from
Blank lines appear in text for innocent reasons. You copy a table from a web page and every row arrives with a gap after it. You export data from a spreadsheet and empty rows come along. You merge two documents and a page break turns into a run of blank lines. You paste chat messages and each message is separated by an empty line. On their own they are harmless, but in bulk they make text hard to read, hard to search and hard to feed into other tools that expect one item per line.
Cleaning them by hand is tedious and error-prone. In a short note you can delete a few blanks, but in a list of hundreds of lines you will miss some and accidentally delete real content while scrolling. An automatic pass is faster and more reliable, and it tells you exactly how many lines it removed.
How this tool works
Paste your text and press the button. The tool goes through the text line by line and drops every line that is completely empty. By default it also drops lines that look empty but actually contain spaces or tabs, because those are the invisible blanks that survive a naive cleanup and still break line counts and imports. The remaining lines keep their original order and their original content, including leading spaces, so indented text is not damaged.
There is a second mode for when you want to keep some breathing room. Instead of deleting every blank line, the collapse option reduces each run of consecutive blank lines to a single one. That is the right choice for prose, where one blank line between paragraphs helps readability, but five in a row does not. The tool reports how many lines it removed, so you can check the result against what you expected.
When to use it
Use it before importing a list into a spreadsheet, a database or another tool, since blank rows often become blank records or shift your data. Use it after copying from web pages, PDFs and chat apps, which are the worst offenders for stray blank lines. Writers use it to tighten drafts that were assembled from fragments. Developers use it to clean pasted logs, config files and data dumps before processing them further.
It is also useful before counting or sorting lines. A blank line in the middle of a sorted list ends up at the top and skews counts, and a trailing run of blanks can make a file look longer than it is. Clean first, then count, sort or analyse.
What to watch out for
Blank lines sometimes carry meaning. In poetry, a blank line marks a stanza break. In a screenplay or a script, it can separate scenes. In some plain-text formats, a blank line is a real delimiter between records. If your text uses blank lines as structure, use the collapse option instead of full removal, or split the text into sections first and clean each one separately.
Also remember that this tool only removes lines, never words or characters inside a line. If a line contains a single stray character, a dash or a dot, it is not blank and it stays. That is deliberate: a tool that guessed at near-blank lines would eventually delete something you wanted to keep.
Tips for clean lists
Run this tool before other line tools, such as adding line numbers or a prefix, so the numbering and wrapping apply to real content only. Check the removed count: if it is far larger than you expected, your source may have double line breaks throughout, which is worth knowing before you paste it anywhere else. And the tool runs fully in your browser, so private lists, work data and personal notes never leave your device.