Example
Total: $48.00 (tax incl.) Thank you for shopping!
Total: $48.00 (tax incl.) Thank you for shopping!
What counts as whitespace
Regular spaces, tabs, and non-breaking spaces, the invisible character that often comes along when you copy from web pages and Word. Line breaks are only removed when you choose “Remove blank lines”, and then only the empty ones.
Two spaces after a period
“Replace repeated spaces with one” also fixes the two-spaces-after-a-period habit, which most current style guides no longer recommend.
Why extra spaces cause problems
Extra spaces are mostly invisible, which is why they cause trouble. A trailing space can make a spreadsheet lookup fail, two spaces between words can break a search, and the non-breaking spaces copied from websites can stop text from wrapping. Cleaning them before you import, compare, or publish text avoids those silent errors.
Choosing the options
For ordinary text, the defaults (trim lines, collapse repeated spaces, convert tabs) are almost always what you want. Turn on “Remove blank lines” when pasting a list. “Remove all spaces” is for values that should contain no spaces at all, such as phone numbers, card numbers copied with spaces, or codes.