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If I go to a YouTube link, e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jfm-92JXVE and I want to copy some comments to notepad, I find some text is still smaller than other text.

If I select it all and do the PureText shortcut key, it still doesn't remove the formatting. If I select all and "change" it to all one font and font size (it was already), it doesn't make it all one size.

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4 Answers 4

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While there isn't any formatting in the text, the text appears to contain Unicode characters (as for which ones I'm unsure), I'm guessing this is what causes the issue. A quick way of removing them is to save the text file as ASCII and reopen it.

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You can find these out of range characters and decide what to do with them.. Some of them may be curly quotes. You might just want to replace those with straight quotes. But others will be your nuisance characters that notepad might not handle well and you'd want to delete.

So for notepad++ a find of [\x{0080}-\x{FFFF}]

Note you'd click the replace tab so you can do find/replace..

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The above should suffice, but some further explanation

The ascii range is 0000h-007Fh i.e. base10, 0-127. So if you search for any unicode outside that i.e. 128+ i.e. 80h-FFFFh then you can find those characters. Regex syntax has the concept of a character range so [A-Z] would be any character between A and Z in unicode. And in notepad++ you specify a character with utf-16 code with the notation of \x{...} where ... is the hex, so for 'A', whose hex is 41, you'd specify \x{0041}. Editpad would use \u.... e.g. \u0041. So in editpad pro you'd do [\u0080-\uFFFF]. In notepad++ you'd do as in the pic above. [\x{0080}-\x{FFFF}] Notice the regex syntax aspect of it is the same, but the way a character is specified differs between text editors.

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for some reason i can throw anything into my notepad, and all formatting is removed without saving it. apart from plain text only some tabs remain. Using Win 7 home premium Version 6.1 SP1 other tips on http://www.techsupportalert.com/remove-unwanted-formatting-from-text.htm and http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2011/07/remove-text-formatting-when-copying-and-pasting.html

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  • -1 what do you mean "for some reason". That is the way notepad is, always has been. And it's very good. And the reason why is obvious. Notepad doesn't save formatting so has no use for it and doesn't apply any formatting. Other than you choose what font to display the file in, but that isn't saved in the file or anywhere. it's just a notepad setting.
    – barlop
    Dec 22, 2013 at 0:22
  • and looking back at this, you're wrong, notepad doesn't remove it, not this one anyway.
    – barlop
    Dec 26, 2013 at 11:27
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Building on R4D4's answer, I suggest the following (either/both worked for me):

1) Use Windows Notepad:

  • (a) paste the text into a new file in Windows Notepad
  • (b) delete any unintended/hidden characters that appear, like soft hyphens (see barlop's answer at this thread: Copying text from YouTube to Clipboard introduces dashes? )
  • (c) save it as an ANSI file (note: a warning message will appear here if the text contains Unicode characters; click ok)
  • (d) open the ANSI file created in the previous step
  • (e) copy and paste the text to your desired destination

2) Use Notepad++

  • (a) paste the text into a new file in Notepad++
  • (b) delete any strange characters that may appear**
  • (c) change the encoding from UTF-8 to ANSI
  • (d) again delete any strange characters that may appear
  • (e) copy and paste the text to your desired destination

**This assumes your Notepad++ settings follow the default to create new files with UTF-8 encoding. Checking for unintended characters in both encodings may be necessary because some problematic characters do not look odd in ANSI and are easier to spot in UTF-8 (like soft hyphens: see barlop's answer at this thread: Copying text from YouTube to Clipboard introduces dashes? ).

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