Remove Line Numbers
Paste numbered text and the numbers come off: 1. and 2., 1) and 2), [1] and [2], zero-padded 001, transcript-style 1: - every common numbering style, plus the space or separator riding after it. The lines underneath come out clean, counted, and ready to copy in one click.
It is the exact inverse of the line-numbering tool, and the companion to every copy-paste that brought numbers along: code review excerpts, legal drafts, song sheets, transcript dumps and OCR output all arrive numbered when you wanted them bare. The tool keeps blank lines blank and leaves lines that never had numbers exactly as they were.
How to use
- Paste the numbered text - clean lines appear below with a count of how many numbers were stripped - and copy when it looks right.
- All the common styles strip at once: you do not need to pick the format, the tool reads each line's own leading number.
- Lines without numbers pass through untouched, so mixed documents keep their headings while the list body comes out clean.
Frequently asked questions
What numbering styles does it strip?
The shapes text actually wears: 1. and 1) with the trailing space, [1] from code review quotes, zero-padded 001 and 0001, transcript counters like 1: or 12:, and Roman numerals I. II. III. for the old-fashioned drafts. Each line is read independently, so a document that switches styles halfway strips cleanly anyway.
Will it eat numbers that are part of the text?
Almost never - only numbers at the very start of a line, followed by a separator, count as labels, so a line like 2 plus 2 equals 4 passes through whole. One honest exception: a line starting with a zero-padded number - 007 James Bond - reads as padding and strips, because a leading zero is the signature of the 001 numbering style and the two cannot be told apart. Everything after the first word is never touched.
Can I keep the numbers but fix their format?
Strip here, then renumber with the line-numbering tool next door: paste the cleaned lines there and choose any format - zero-padded, bracketed, continuing from any start. The pair covers the full round trip from one numbering scheme to another without manual retyping, which is the chore this exists to end.
Does it work on pasted code with line numbers?
Yes for the unambiguous shapes: 12: let x = 1 with a colon, and [12] quotes from code review. The bare-space form - 12 let x = 1 - cannot be told apart from a sentence that simply starts with a number, so the default punctuation rule leaves it alone; the bare-space toggle opts in when you know your text is IDE output. Diff markers + and - are not numbers and pass through untouched.
Why do OCR scans need this?
Scanned books and photocopies bake their page furniture into the text layer: page numbers, line counters, section numerals. OCR output is also the case where the count line earns its keep - if you pasted forty lines and only thirty-five numbers stripped, five lines have content-shaped numbers worth a second look before you trust the clean copy.