AltF Flow recipe

Clean and dedupe a keyword list

A keyword list from several tools usually has stray spaces, mixed case and repeats that only differ by spacing. This recipe trims each line, collapses double spaces, lowercases everything, removes blank lines and duplicates, then sorts A-Z. The result is one normalised keyword per line, ready for grouping or pasting into a planner.

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6 steps · runs in your browser · nothing uploaded

Pipeline

  1. Remove leading and trailing spaces from each line.

    10 → 10 lines

  2. Turn runs of spaces and tabs into a single space.

    10 → 10 lines

  3. lowercase

    10 → 10 lines

  4. Remove all

    10 → 8 lines (-2)

  5. Keep the first copy of each line and drop repeats.

    8 → 4 lines (-4)

  6. Alphabetical

    No change

10lines29words191chars

4lines15words97chars-6 lines vs input

The 6 steps in this recipe

  1. 1

    Trim every line

    Remove leading and trailing spaces from each line.

  2. 2

    Collapse repeated spaces

    Turn runs of spaces and tabs into a single space.

  3. 3

    Change case - lowercase

    UPPER, lower, Title, Sentence, camelCase, PascalCase, snake_case, kebab-case or CONSTANT_CASE.

  4. 4

    Remove empty lines - Remove all

    Delete blank lines, or squeeze runs of blank lines down to one so paragraphs stay apart.

  5. 5

    Remove duplicate lines

    Keep the first copy of each line and drop repeats.

  6. 6

    Sort lines - Alphabetical

    Sort A to Z, Z to A, naturally (2 before 10), by number or by length.

Change any option in the workspace above, switch a step off to compare, or add your own steps. Save it to reuse it, or share the recipe as a link.

Worked example

Before
Best Running Shoes
best  running shoes 
running shoes for flat feet

Trail Running Shoes
  best running shoes
running shoes   for flat feet
waterproof trail running shoes

trail running shoes
After
best running shoes
running shoes for flat feet
trail running shoes
waterproof trail running shoes

Why the order of steps matters

Dedupe compares whole lines exactly, so it has to run after trimming, collapsing spaces and lowercasing. Otherwise "best running shoes " and "Best Running Shoes" would both survive. Sorting last keeps near-identical phrases next to each other so you can spot plurals and word-order variants by eye.

Variations

  • Add Remove punctuation after lowercasing to merge "shoes, running" with "shoes running". Skip it if your keywords include terms like c++ or node.js.
  • Add Filter lines set to Remove with a brand name to drop branded queries.
  • Use Sort by line length instead to see long-tail phrases last.

Keyword list cleaner: questions and answers

Does it merge plurals like shoe and shoes?

No. It only merges lines that are identical after the cleanup steps. Grouping by meaning needs a manual pass.

Can I keep search volume columns?

This recipe is for a plain keyword column. Copy only that column, or use a text column extractor first.

How many keywords can I paste?

Anything up to 2 MB of text, which is tens of thousands of typical keyword lines.

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Every step you can add (41)

Clean up

  • Trim whitespace
  • Trim every line
  • Remove empty lines
  • Collapse repeated spaces
  • Remove line breaks
  • Strip HTML tags
  • Straighten smart quotes
  • Remove accents
  • Remove punctuation
  • Remove emoji
  • Remove non-ASCII characters

Change case

  • Change case
  • Make URL slugs

Lines

  • Sort lines
  • Remove duplicate lines
  • Keep only duplicated lines
  • Compare with another list
  • Count repeated lines
  • Reverse line order
  • Shuffle lines
  • Keep a range of lines
  • Truncate long lines
  • Wrap at a width
  • Split into lines
  • Join lines

Find and filter

  • Find and replace
  • Filter lines
  • Remove words or characters

Extract

  • Extract

Data and formats

  • Format JSON
  • Minify JSON
  • CSV to JSON
  • JSON to CSV
  • Lines to JSON array
  • JSON array to lines

Encode and decode

  • Encode or decode

Build output

  • Add prefix / suffix
  • Quote each line
  • Number lines
  • Apply a line template
  • Add timestamp
What each step does, with its options

AltF Flow runs entirely in your browser. Your text is never sent to AltFTool; saved recipes stay in this browser and shared links carry the steps only.