The Complete Guide to Online Text Utilities

A text utility is any small tool that takes text as input and returns modified text, statistics or a transformation. Counters, case converters, whitespace cleaners, sorters, encoders, formatters and slug generators all qualify.

The category has exploded because the underlying jobs are universal. Every writer, developer, marketer and student runs into text problems every week; a handful of well-made utilities solves 90% of them.

Count words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, lines and reading time. The most-used category because word count is the most-quoted constraint in professional writing. See the Word Counter and Character Counter for the two you'll reach for most.

Strip whitespace, remove blank lines, dedupe lines and words. Every copy-paste from a PDF, email or web page needs at least one cleaner pass. Remove Extra Spaces and Duplicate Line Remover cover most cases.

Change case, encoding or format. Text Case Converter, Reverse Text and Text to Slug Converter cover the common jobs.

Produce placeholder or random text. Lorem Ipsum Generator, Random Text Generator and Text Repeater cover mockups and testing.

URL, Base64 and HTML encoders and decoders for debugging encoding issues, plus JSON, HTML and Markdown formatters for pretty-printing code.

Keyword Density Checker for the pre-publish balance check. Combine with the Character Counter for meta title/description and the Text to Slug Converter for URLs.

You won't need every tool every week. Start with the five you use most — for most writers, that's the Word Counter, Character Counter, Text Case Converter, Remove Extra Spaces and Keyword Density Checker — and expand from there.

The whole idea of small tools is that they compose. The more you have in your bookmarks, the more workflows you can assemble on the fly.