mac-clipboard-cleaner

Clean invisible characters and awkward whitespace from copied text without sending it anywhere. pbclean is a small command-line tool for prose copied from PDFs, websites, chat apps, and documents. On macOS, it can clean the clipboard in place with one command.

$ printf 'Hello\u00a0world\u200b!  \r\n' | pbclean
Hello world!

The input above contains a non-breaking space, a zero-width space, trailing spaces, and a Windows line ending. The output does not.

Why pbclean?

• Private: processing stays on your computer.
• Small: the runtime uses only Python's standard library.
• Predictable: paragraph breaks and visible wording stay intact.
• Scriptable: read from the clipboard, a UTF-8 file, or standard input.
• Native on macOS: clipboard support uses the built-in pbpaste and pbcopy commands.

Quick start

Install the latest version directly from GitHub:

python3 -m pip install \
  "git+https://github.com/ydsveluvolu2996/mac-clipboard-cleaner.git"

Then clean your macOS clipboard in place:

pbclean --clipboard --copy

For an isolated command-line installation, use pipx:

pipx install git+https://github.com/ydsveluvolu2996/mac-clipboard-cleaner.git

What it cleans

Input problem	Result
Zero-width spaces, joiners, word joiners, byte-order marks	Removed
Non-breaking and narrow non-breaking spaces	Converted to regular spaces
Windows (CRLF) and classic Mac (CR) line endings	Normalized to LF
Spaces and tabs at the ends of lines	Removed by default

pbclean is intended for copied prose and source text. Zero-width joiners can be meaningful in some languages and emoji sequences, so inspect the result before using it with text where those characters are intentional.

Usage

Pipe copied or generated text through pbclean:

some-command | pbclean

Clean a UTF-8 text file:

pbclean notes.txt > notes-clean.txt

Keep spaces and tabs at the ends of lines:

pbclean --keep-trailing-whitespace notes.txt

The package can also run as a Python module:

python3 -m pbclean --version

macOS clipboard

Print cleaned clipboard text without changing the clipboard:

pbclean --clipboard

Clean the clipboard and immediately copy the result back:

pbclean --clipboard --copy

You can also send file or standard-input content to the clipboard with --copy. Clipboard options require macOS; file and standard-input cleaning work wherever Python does.

Python API

The cleaning function is available for scripts and applications:

from pbclean import clean_text

cleaned = clean_text("Copied\u00a0text\u200b")
assert cleaned == "Copied text"

Development

Clone the project, install it, and run its standard-library test suite:

git clone https://github.com/ydsveluvolu2996/mac-clipboard-cleaner.git
cd mac-clipboard-cleaner
python3 -m pip install .
python3 -m unittest discover -s tests -v

Pull requests are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the small project checklist.

License

MIT