Remove Extra Spaces

1. Runs of spaces inside a line become a single space. Two or more tabs in a row, or a mix of spaces and tabs, also become one space.
2. Leading whitespace at the start of every line is removed, so indentation goes.
3. Trailing whitespace at the end of every line is removed.

A real run, with the tab shown as [tab]:

• A single tab between words stays a tab. Only runs of two or more are collapsed. That keeps tab-separated data copied from a spreadsheet intact, as long as no cell is empty. Two tabs in a row mean an empty cell, and they become one space.
• Blank lines stay. Three empty lines between paragraphs are still three empty lines. Use Remove Empty Lines if you want them gone.
• Line breaks stay. Your lines are cleaned one by one, never joined. Use Text to One Line to flatten them.
• Non-breaking spaces stay. These look like normal spaces but are a different character, common in text copied from web pages and word processors. Two of them in a row are not collapsed.

If you learned to type two spaces after every sentence, this converts a whole document to single spaces in one pass. Sentence one. Sentence two. becomes Sentence one. Sentence two.

It also cleans up the double spaces left behind by other tools. Removing punctuation or duplicate words deletes a word or symbol but leaves the spaces on either side of it, so running this afterwards closes the gap.

Indentation is removed from every line, so don't run code through it if the indentation matters. Python and YAML stop working when their leading spaces are removed, and nested Markdown lists lose their nesting. Text laid out in columns with spaces, such as a plain-text table, also falls apart. For those, fix the spacing by hand or use your code editor's formatter.