CleanHaven is a free text cleanup and manipulation app for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
This is not a simple program that merely converts text-case and removes unprintable characters (similar to the many “email cleaning” apps that are out there); but is a sophisticated, well designed ” swiss army knife” of a tool for text manipulation functions.
The functions on offer span a wide range, from simple case conversion and character removal (such as excess carriage returns or non-ASCII characters), to combining lines separated by carriage returns into paragraphs, deduping lists lists (as in the screenshot above), filtering correctly and incorrectly spelled words in a text, general search and replace, removal of trailing spaces, tabs or punctuation, and a table view where you can manipulate your text in a spreadsheet style grid, to name just a few.
This is the kind of program that can give a reviewer a hard time, in the sense that it offers such a wide range of functions that it becomes impossible to cover them all. Therefore, I have decided to aggregate the different functions into a single image instead, which can probably better illustrate what is on offer here at a glance without my having to explain them all. See image below.
Here are more notes on this program:
- The interface: is quite nice. There are 6 dropdowns in the main area that offer various functions (see image above), but what is nice is that you are able to manipulate the text then use the results in the output screen as your source text, in order to quickly string together a number of interventions in succession.
- Tables: CleanHaven supports a table view, whereby you could paste any text from Excel, from a CSV file, or any other source and it view these within CleanHaven in a grid. It will even recognize the first row as column headers, and let you click on the header to quickly sort your text. (Note: use the ’settings’ tab to define the column that CleanHaven should use in performing operations such as deduping, etc.)
- Export to CSV: or tab-delimited text files is supported
The verdict: CleanHaven is unique in two respect; first, in the breadth and sheer range of text manipulation options that it offers, and second in its spreadsheet style handling of tables. Because of all the power it packs under the hood, it can seem a tad too complex at first glance if all you want to do is something straightforward, such as simply combine the truncated lines from an email into a single paragraph; however, it will only take a minute or so to intuitively figure out exactly what you need to do to get the results you seek.
But what is more impressive is its handling of tables. You should not expect this program to handle large amounts of data (pasting 200,000 rows in 5 columns from Excel then switching to table view effectively crashed the program); however, for most “normal” table and list management tasks it will perform admirably.
This program is definitely a keeper. No matter what you do or how you use your computer, you could definitely use this in your collection of tools; it will invariably come in handy and it will deliver beautifully.
Version Tested: 2.1
Compatibility: WinAll, MacOSX, Linux
Go to the program home page to download the latest version (approx 3.2 megs for the Windows version)
