I spent 20 minutes manually fixing a blog post that had been drafted in Microsoft Word and pasted directly into a CMS. The “smart quotes” broke the template. The en-dashes looked wrong in the browser. There were non-breaking spaces that pushed layout elements out of place. Every one of these is a different character that the visual editor hid. A 30-second text cleaning pass before pasting would have saved those 20 minutes.
Count words, clean text, convert case, locally.
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Open Word Counter →Word Count and Reading Time
Word count & reading time
Words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, plus reading time at 200-240 wpm.
Case conversion
Upper, lower, title, sentence, camelCase, kebab-case, and snake_case.
Text cleaning
Strip non-breaking spaces, zero-width spaces, smart quotes, and em dashes from pasted text.
Markdown to HTML
Convert Markdown to HTML with marked or markdown-it for CMSes and email.
A word counter should give you more than a single number. The useful metrics for writing are:
- Word count: split on whitespace, handle multi-word hyphenated terms correctly
- Character count (with spaces): relevant for character-limited platforms (Twitter, meta descriptions)
- Character count (without spaces): relevant for SMS (160 characters per SMS segment)
- Reading time: based on 200–240 words per minute (typical adult reading speed)
- Speaking time: based on 130 words per minute (typical speech rate)
- Sentence count and average sentence length: readability indicators
1// Text analysis in JavaScript2function analyzeText(text: string) {3 // Normalise whitespace4 const cleaned = text.trim().replace(/s+/g, ' ');5 6 const words = cleaned.split(/s+/).filter(w => w.length > 0);7 const sentences = cleaned.split(/[.!?]+/).filter(s => s.trim().length > 0);8 const chars = cleaned.length;9 const charsNoSpaces = cleaned.replace(/s/g, '').length;10 11 return {12 wordCount: words.length,13 charCount: chars,14 charCountNoSpaces: charsNoSpaces,15 sentenceCount: sentences.length,16 avgWordsPerSentence: Math.round(words.length / sentences.length),17 readingTime: Math.ceil(words.length / 220), // minutes at 220 wpm18 speakingTime: Math.ceil(words.length / 130), // minutes at 130 wpm19 };20}Case Conversion
The cases that actually come up in real work:
1const text = "the quick BROWN fox jumps over the lazy dog";2 3// Common case conversions4const uppercase = text.toUpperCase();5// → "THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG"6 7const lowercase = text.toLowerCase();8// → "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"9 10const titleCase = text.replace(/w/g, c => c.toUpperCase());11// → "The Quick BROWN Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog"12// (Note: doesn't fix existing uppercase — see sentenceCase)13 14const sentenceCase = text.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + text.slice(1).toLowerCase();15// → "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"16 17// camelCase — for variable names18const camelCase = text19 .split(/s+/)20 .map((word, i) => i === 0 ? word.toLowerCase() : word.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + word.slice(1).toLowerCase())21 .join('');22// → "theQuickBrownFoxJumpsOverTheLazyDog"23 24// kebab-case — for CSS classes, URL slugs25const kebabCase = text.toLowerCase().replace(/s+/g, '-');26// → "the-quick-brown-fox-jumps-over-the-lazy-dog"27 28// snake_case — for database columns, Python variables29const snakeCase = text.toLowerCase().replace(/s+/g, '_');30// → "the_quick_brown_fox_jumps_over_the_lazy_dog"Text Cleaning: Removing Hidden Junk
This is the unglamorous category of text tools that saves the most time in practice. When you copy text from a browser, PDF, or Word document, you often get invisible characters:
1// Common hidden characters that break layouts and templates2// (Use charCodeAt() to detect them in JavaScript)3 4// Non-breaking space (U+00A0) — looks like a space, breaks word-wrap differently5' '.charCodeAt(0); // → 160 (not 32 like a regular space)6 7// Zero-width space (U+200B) — invisible, breaks string matching8''.charCodeAt(0); // → 82039 10// Smart quotes — look like quotes, break code and JSON11'‘' // Left single quote '12'’' // Right single quote '13'“' // Left double quote "14'”' // Right double quote "15 16// Em dash (U+2014) vs hyphen (U+002D) — breaks regex patterns17'—' // Em dash —18'-' // Hyphen -19 20// Clean all of these in one pass:21function cleanText(text: string): string {22 return text23 .replace(/ /g, ' ') // NBSP → space24 .replace(//g, '') // Zero-width space → remove25 .replace(/[‘’]/g, "'") // Smart quotes → straight26 .replace(/[“”]/g, '"') // Smart double quotes → straight27 .replace(/—/g, '--') // Em dash → double hyphen28 .replace(/
29/g, '30') // Windows line endings → Unix31 .replace(/
/g, '32') // Old Mac line endings → Unix33 .replace(/34{3,}/g, '35 36') // Multiple blank lines → max 137 .trim();38}Markdown to HTML Conversion
For writers who work in Markdown but need HTML output (for CMSes, email clients, or documentation systems), a local markdown converter is useful. The two most common JavaScript Markdown parsers:
- marked: Fast, small (10KB), supports GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM)
- markdown-it: More extensible, good plugin ecosystem, supports tables and footnotes
1import { marked } from 'marked';2 3const markdown = `4# Article Title5 6This is a **bold** statement with *italic* emphasis.7 8- Item one9- Item two10- Item three11 12\`\`\`javascript13const x = 42;14\`\`\`15`;16 17// Convert to HTML18const html = marked.parse(markdown);19// → <h1>Article Title</h1><p>This is a <strong>bold</strong>...</p>20 21// For safe rendering in browser (sanitise to prevent XSS)22import DOMPurify from 'dompurify';23document.getElementById('output').innerHTML = DOMPurify.sanitize(html);For developers working with structured data rather than prose, our JSON data tools guide covers formatting, querying, and transforming JSON, the structured text equivalent of these prose utilities.
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