How to Remove Line Breaks in Word (and Keep Paragraphs)
When you paste text from a PDF or an email into Microsoft Word, every line often ends with a hard break. The text looks broken and will not reflow when you change the margins. This guide shows how to remove those line breaks in Word with Find and Replace, including a trick that keeps your real paragraphs.
Step 1: See the hidden marks
Press Ctrl+Shift+8 (or click the ¶ button on the Home tab). Now you can see two kinds of breaks:
- ¶ Paragraph mark: created with Enter. In Find and Replace it is
^p. - ↵ Manual line break: created with Shift+Enter, common in text from websites. In Find and Replace it is
^l(lowercase L).
Step 2: Remove all line breaks
- Select the text you want to fix (or nothing, to fix the whole document).
- Press Ctrl+H to open Find and Replace.
- In Find what, type
^p(or^lfor manual line breaks). - In Replace with, type a single space.
- Click Replace All.
This joins everything into one paragraph. That is perfect for short text, but for a long document you probably want to keep the paragraphs. Use the next method instead.
Remove line breaks but keep paragraphs
In text copied from a PDF, real paragraphs are usually separated by an empty line (two paragraph marks in a row), while single marks are only line ends. Use a placeholder to protect the real paragraphs:
- Replace
^p^pwith#PARA#(any text that does not appear in your document). - Replace
^pwith a space. This removes the broken line ends. - Replace
#PARA#with^p. Your paragraphs come back.
Clean up double spaces
After removing breaks you may see two spaces in some places. Replace two spaces with one space and click Replace All a few times until Word finds nothing.
The one-click alternative
Our free Remove Paragraph Breaks tool does all three steps at once: paste the text, keep "Keep paragraphs" selected, and copy the result back into Word. It also fixes words split with a hyphen at the end of a line ("para- graph"). If you want everything on one line, use the main Remove Line Breaks tool.
Have the whole document? You do not need to copy anything: upload the Word or PDF file directly and download clean text.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between ^p and ^l in Word?
^p is a paragraph mark (Enter) and ^l is a manual line break (Shift+Enter). Text from websites often uses manual line breaks, so try ^l if ^p finds nothing.
Does this work in Word for Mac and Word Online?
Yes. On a Mac open Edit, Find, Advanced Find and Replace. In Word Online open Replace from the Home tab; it supports ^p as well.
Why does my PDF text still look broken after pasting?
PDFs store each visual line separately, so Word receives a break at the end of every line. Use the "keep paragraphs" method above, or our Fix PDF text mode, to join the lines.
Can I paste without line breaks in the first place?
Not reliably. Paste Special, Unformatted Text keeps the breaks. Cleaning the text first in a tool and then pasting is the fastest way.