Line Ending & Tab Converter

Line endings

Operating systems mark the end of a line differently:

• LF (\n): Linux, macOS, most code repositories and web servers;
• CRLF (\r\n): Windows, many Windows apps, and protocols like HTTP and SMTP;
• CR (\r): classic Mac OS before 2001.

Mixed or unexpected endings cause noisy diffs, failing shell scripts (“/bin/bash^M: bad interpreter”), CSV import problems and checksum mismatches. Choose the target ending and the download keeps exactly those bytes.

Browsers convert line endings to LF inside text boxes, so to detect a file’s existing endings, load it with Open: the report under the result then counts CRLF, LF and CR in the original.

Tabs, trailing spaces and the final newline

• Tabs → spaces expands each tab to the next tab stop (not a fixed number of spaces), so alignment is preserved.
• Leading spaces → tabs converts indentation only.
• Trim trailing whitespace removes invisible spaces at line ends that show up as changes in code review.
• Final newline: POSIX tools expect text files to end with a newline; some linters require it, others forbid a blank last line.

function hello() {
	console.log("hi");   
        return true;
}

function hello() {
	console.log("hi");
        return true;
}

Last reviewed 1 November 2026 · How Textkiln tools work