How to Clean Formatting From ChatGPT, Claude or Other AI Output

Chat assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude usually format their answers with Markdown. The chat window turns that Markdown into headings, bold text and bullet lists, but paste the same answer somewhere that does not interpret Markdown and you see the raw symbols: # in front of headings, ** around phrases, backticks around commands, rows of pipes where a table was. To clean AI text formatting you remove those markers and tidy the spacing, and leave the words as they are.

The short version: paste the answer into the Text Cleaner, choose the AI Formatting preset and press Clean Text. Then add only what your destination still needs, such as plain list lines or straight quotes.

Why the symbols show up

What the assistant produces is a stream of plain characters that includes Markdown syntax. The interface renders it, and what you get when you paste depends on which version of the answer was copied. A copy can hold a formatted representation and a plain-text one side by side, and each destination takes the one it understands.

What you see after pasting	What was copied	What needs cleaning
Markers everywhere: #, **, backticks, pipes	The Markdown source	The markers, then the spacing
No markers, but bullet characters, extra blank lines or odd spaces	The plain-text version of the rendered answer	Spacing, and bullet characters if they are unwanted
Headings, bold and lists arrive as real formatting	The formatted version, pasted into a rich editor	Nothing, unless the fonts and sizes are unwelcome

Which of these a Copy button or a mouse selection gives you differs between apps and changes with their updates, so test with the one you use.

What to look for

• Heading markers: one to six # characters at the start of a line.
• Bold and italic markers: ** or __ around a phrase, * or _ around a word.
• Backticks and code fences around commands, file names and code.
• List markers: -, * or 1. in Markdown source, or • characters in a rendered copy.
• Horizontal rules: a line of --- between sections.
• Tables as pipes: rows of cells separated by pipe characters, with a row of dashes under the header.
• Extra blank lines between sections, often two or three in a row.
• Trailing spaces. In Markdown, two spaces at the end of a line force a line break, so they can be there on purpose and still be unwanted in the destination.
• Non-breaking spaces (U+00A0), which can come along when text is copied from a rendered web page.
• Typographic punctuation: curly quotes, en and em dashes, the single-character ellipsis. These are correct in prose and a problem only where plain ASCII is required.

A workflow that starts from the destination

1. Decide where the text is going

Destination	What to check	Aim for
Plain text field (web form, support ticket, SMS)	Nothing: every symbol is shown as typed	No markers; lists as simple hyphen or number lines
Email, CMS or website editor	Paste one line of Markdown. Some editors convert it, others show it literally	If it stays literal, strip the markers and apply headings and bold with the editor’s own controls
Google Docs	Its Paste from Markdown command converts Markdown once Markdown is enabled in the preferences	Use that command, or paste clean text and apply styles yourself
Other document editors	Unless the editor has a Markdown import, pasted source stays as symbols	Paste clean text and apply styles yourself
Spreadsheet	Pasted lines normally land in separate rows, with a whole pipe table in one column	No markers; split a pipe table into columns

2. Run the AI Formatting preset

The preset is General Clean plus three Markdown options. It removes heading markers (#), bold and italic markers (**, *, __, _), code-fence lines and the backticks around inline code. From General Clean it converts non-breaking spaces to ordinary spaces, trims trailing spaces from each line, collapses repeated spaces inside lines, reduces runs of blank lines to one, and trims the start and end of the text.

List markers are kept unless you tick the option for them. The contents of fenced code blocks are skipped, so a # comment inside code is not treated as a heading, and text inside inline backticks keeps its asterisks and underscores. This is formatting cleanup only: the preset never changes, rewrites or paraphrases the words.

3. Add only what the destination needs

• Remove Markdown list markers if the destination supplies its own bullets or you are turning a list into running text. It removes -, *, + and number markers. Leave it off when the numbers record an order. It does not remove • characters; for those, put the bullet and its space in Find and leave Replace with empty.
• Remove empty lines if the destination adds its own space between paragraphs and blank lines would double it.
• The Typography options (Smart quotes → straight quotes, Smart apostrophes → straight apostrophes, En dash → hyphen, Em dash → hyphen, Ellipsis character → three periods) are off in every preset. Tick them only when the destination needs ASCII punctuation: code, configuration files, data headed for an older system, a form that garbles curly characters. In ordinary prose those characters are correct and should stay. An em dash becomes a single hyphen, so an unspaced one turns two words into what looks like a compound; read each one afterwards. Smart quotes versus straight quotes explains when each belongs.
• Line breaks stay as they are by default. For a single-line field choose Replace every line break with a space. To turn a list into one comma-separated line, use the Remove Line Breaks tool with Replace line breaks with a custom separator and the comma separator.

4. Fix by hand what no option rewrites

Links written as [text](url), tables, blockquote markers (>) and horizontal rules are not removed by any option, because each needs a decision: keep the address or only the link text, turn the table into sentences or into columns. Delete rule lines directly. For a pipe table bound for a spreadsheet, delete the row of dashes, paste the rest, and split it into columns on the pipe character if your spreadsheet has a command for that. Removing Markdown formatting gives Find & Replace patterns for links, images and quote markers.

5. Read it once

Check the places where a symbol was doing another job: a line that starts with # and a space but was never a heading, underscores at the edges of a name such as __init__, a numbered step that other text refers to. For longer pieces headed for publication, the text cleanup checklist puts this step into a fuller sequence.

Before and after

In this example · stands for a space, to make the two trailing spaces visible.

Before

## Meeting follow-up

**Subject:** Notes from Tuesday’s call··

Hi Dana,

Here are the **three** points we agreed on:

- Move the launch to *14 March*
- Send the draft to `legal@example.com`
- Keep the budget where it is — no increase this quarter



---

Let me know if anything is missing.

After

Meeting follow-up

Subject: Notes from Tuesday’s call

Hi Dana,

Here are the three points we agreed on:

- Move the launch to 14 March
- Send the draft to legal@example.com
- Keep the budget where it is — no increase this quarter

---

Let me know if anything is missing.

That is the AI Formatting preset with nothing else ticked. The change summary reads “1 code marker removed”, “1 heading marker removed”, “3 bold/italic marker pairs removed”, “1 line trimmed” and “2 blank lines collapsed”. The three blank lines above the rule became one. The hyphen bullets, the curly apostrophe and the em dash are unchanged, and the --- rule is still there to delete by hand.

Asking for plain text in the first place

You can often avoid the cleanup by telling the assistant what you want:

Reply in plain text only. Do not use Markdown: no headings, no bold or italics, no bullet symbols, no tables, no code fences. Separate paragraphs with one blank line.

Results vary, and in a long conversation the instruction may need repeating. When part of an answer still arrives with markers, the workflow above covers it.