How to Remove Line Breaks From Copied or Scanned Text (iPhone, Mac and Web)

You copy a paragraph from a PDF or a photo, paste it into an email, and get a staircase of short lines. Every line ends where it ended on the original page. Fixing it by hand means deleting dozens of line breaks one at a time. Here is why it happens and the quick ways to fix it.

I build SnapText - Image to Text, a free iPhone OCR app that reads text on your device, and the screenshots in this guide come from it. If you want to try each step as you read, get SnapText on the App Store.

Why does copied text have line breaks?

PDFs do not store paragraphs. They store lines of text placed on a page. Text recognition (OCR) does the same: it reads the image line by line. When you copy the result, each visual line becomes a line of text, followed by a hard line break. Hyphenated words at the end of lines often come through split, like "infor- mation".

What is the right way to fix it?

You want to remove the line breaks inside paragraphs, but keep the breaks between them. In practice:

• A single line break becomes a space.
• A double line break (a blank line) stays, so paragraphs remain separate.
• A hyphen at the end of a line is joined to the next word.

How do I remove line breaks on iPhone?

With SnapText

Extract the text from the photo, screenshot or scan, then use the text tools to clean up line breaks and spacing. Copy or share the result, and it pastes as normal paragraphs.

With the Shortcuts app

1. Create a shortcut with Get Clipboard, then Replace Text.
2. In Replace Text, turn on Regular Expression, find (?<!\n)\n(?!\n) and replace with a single space.
3. Add Copy to Clipboard.
4. Copy your text, run the shortcut, and paste.

How do I remove line breaks on Mac or Windows?

• Microsoft Word: first replace ^p^p with a placeholder like ##, then replace ^p with a space, then replace ## with ^p.
• Code and text editors (VS Code, Sublime Text, BBEdit, Notepad++): use Find and Replace with regular expressions, find (?<!\n)\n(?!\n) and replace with a space.
• On a Mac with Picture to Text: the Clean Up tool joins broken lines and removes extra spaces, with undo.

What about extra spaces and odd characters?

• Double spaces: replace two spaces with one, and repeat until none are left.
• Split words: search for "- " (hyphen and space) and check each one.
• Curly quotes and odd symbols: some PDFs use unusual characters. Retyping a quote mark fixes it.
• Page numbers and headers mixed into the text: delete them after joining lines.

If the source is a photo, a cleaner capture means less fixing. See 10 tips for more accurate OCR, and for scanning paper documents, how to scan a document to editable text.

How SnapText helps

• Extract all the text at once from a photo, screenshot, scanned document or the camera.
• Edit the result straight away, and clean up line breaks and spacing in one tap.
• Detect links, emails and phone numbers so you can use them directly.
• Scan several pages and keep them together.
• Search your saved scans later, and copy, share or export the text.
• Private by design: on-device recognition, no account, no tracking, and core OCR works offline.

Download SnapText free on the App Store and turn any image into text you can use.