Chances are that if you've ever tried copying and pasting text from an email client or web browser that you've been left with the unpleasant surprise of formatting that leaves much to be desired. 
Because web browsers use invisible tags to designate line breaks, and email clients impose strict margins, the text rarely comes out the way you want it to. Enter textSOAP, a one of a kind utility designed to "clean," or remove hard carriage returns, extra spaces, and more from text.
textSOAP is incredibly easy to use: when you come across some text that you wish to clean, simply use the copy command from the Edit menu, load up textSOAP, and the copied text appears in textSOAP's window. From there you have a handful of options to manipulate the text, including the all-in-one SCRUB choice that alone cleans roughly 90% of your text. Other more specific options include removing multiple spaces, converting the text entirely to uppercase or lowercase, capitalizing sentences, adding or removing smart quotes, and removing forwarding characters often found in emails. Once you've applied the appropriate cleaning filter, recopy the text from textSOAP's window and paste it into the desired location.
For anyone who has ever been faced with having to work with text and its sometimes unruly formatting, textSOAP is a godsend; it can do things in seconds that otherwise would take you several minutes or more.
© 1998 The MacNN Review
