MarkdownTidy — Markdown Whitespace Cleaner, Table Aligner & Linter

Markdown Whitespace Cleaner 100% CLIENT-SIDE

Raw Markdown Input

Cleaned Markdown

Trailing whitespace only

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Guides

GFM Pipe Tables Markdown Trailing Spaces, Hard Breaks and Setext Headings

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is my data safe on markdowntidy.net?

Yes. Formatting and linting happen entirely in your browser, so drafts are never uploaded.

Can it align messy pipe tables?

Yes, on the table formatter page. It pads each column to its widest cell and rebuilds the separator row, keeping alignment colons, which keeps tables readable in raw form and produces clean diffs. Tables inside code fences are left alone, and a table with a row wider than its header is left as written.

Will it rewrite my content?

No. The home page only removes trailing whitespace and blank lines at the ends, and the table formatter only changes table padding. Prose, links, list markers and code-block contents are left as written. Note that trimming deletes the two trailing spaces Markdown reads as a hard line break.

🧭 Pro Tips & Gotchas

What this does

Removes trailing spaces from every line and trims trailing blank lines. Nothing else changes — including the two spaces that carry meaning in Markdown.

The one whitespace rule that matters

Two trailing spaces = a hard line break. Trailing-whitespace trimmers delete them and silently turn your poem, address block, or changelog into one wrapped paragraph. Check whether those two spaces were intentional before tidying; prettier --parser markdown will convert them to a backslash hard break, which survives trimming.
Set no-markdown in your .editorconfig/trim-on-save config for .md files, or add *.md: trim_trailing_whitespace: false. This is the setting people discover after a bad diff.

Markdown gotchas

Blank lines are structure, not decoration: two list items with a blank line between them render as a loose list (each <li> wrapped in <p>), which changes spacing and breaks CSS that assumes tight lists.
Nested list indentation is renderer-dependent: 2 spaces works in most CommonMark renderers, 4 is safest, 1 fails. GitHub and CommonMark disagree on some legacy indent styles.
1. is normalised to the first number by most renderers, so an ordered list written 3. 4. 5. may render 1. 2. 3.. Use start= in HTML or accept it.
ATX headings need a space: #Title is not a heading in CommonMark (GitHub renders it literally). Setext headings (===/--- under text) are fragile — a stray --- under a paragraph turns the paragraph into a heading.
Tables need the leading and trailing pipes and a separator row; a missing pipe on one row silently makes the whole table render as plain text.
Fenced code blocks: the info string must not contain backticks, and a fence inside a fence needs more backticks than the outer one. Four-backtick outer fences are the reliable fix.
Autolinks are not links. <https://example.com> works, bare example.com may or may not be linkified depending on the renderer, and a URL containing ) needs angle brackets to survive.