Clean Text

I bought this app last year and used it practically every day, but when the pricing model changed, I lost access to all the features I had come to rely upon. I reached out to the dev team, and they were incredibly kind, offering me exactly the assistance I needed to restore permanent access to all the features I had when I first paid for the app. I have literally never in my life had a customer service experience this good. The only comparison I can think to make is to the ending of Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, when Rose of Sharon, having just birthed a stillborn child, offers an emaciated stranger milk from her breast’s milk spigot. Being able to convert RTF into UTF-8 plaintext, remove empty lines, go from sentence case to title case and back, and much much more is the Unicode-HTML-JSON-hopper’s equivalent of being nursed back to health by a stranger’s breast during the compounding crises of mass migration, economic collapse, and ecological disaster precipitated by the Dust Bowl, mechanization of agriculture, and the corporate displacement of tenant farmers. Even if my $0.99 unlimited access to the app hadn’t been restored thanks to the help of the Christlike developers, the app is so useful and life changing that, if I had no other choice, I still would’ve paid the new $40 asking price (which I will acknowledge is an easy statement to make after-the-fact, but you’ll just have to trust me that I’m being sincere, which I am. This review is sincere — there is too much at stake for it to be anything less).

This is the utility you didn't know you needed! I use this quite often, when working with text information. I don't know of any other so that can do what this one does. This app can save an incredible amount of time making repetitive changes to a document. The undo capability allows undoing 1 or more changes, so if you mess up, you can usually recover, without having to start over. If you are technically inclined, doing a search and replace using Regular Expressions can be very powerful. I can't say enough good things about this app, with all of the benefits I have received from using it.

I was a bit dubious of this and other similar apps. Would it be worth the small purchase price? Would it do the very simple thing I needed it to do by taking text from other apps and stripping it of all its formatting so I could paste plain text into another app? Would it be cluttered with cumbersome “features” that I had no use for and that just got in my way? I’m happy to say that it does a great job of allowing me to paste formatted text from apps on iOS devices and strip it down to bare bones plain text which I can then paste as simple, plain text into other apps — a feature the iOS should obviously have built into it but badly lacks. In addition, it has an unobtrusive menu of options to manipulate text in useful ways if that’s something you want or need to do. You can change case, quote or de-quote text, quickly and easily sort lines of text, find and replace text, and even allows for the use of regular expressions. You can also save the text as a note or export it in other ways. You can do all of that and more by clicking the wrench tool icon which is located at the top right corner of the screen, but you never need bother with or even see it if you don’t want to. I hope the creator of this app continues to support it over the lifetime of iOS because I find it an essential utility which I use dozens of times a day on my iOS devices. In fact, I’ve written this review using it before pasting it into this review.