hownz.com: Your Safe Paste & Text Cleaning Toolkit 🛡️

Ever copied text from the web and worried about what might be hiding in it?

These days, text from AI chats and websites can contain invisible code, hidden watermarks, and tracking symbols. This isn't just about messy formatting—it can be a real security risk. Hidden text can be used for phishing, tracking your online activity, or even triggering malicious attacks on your system.

hownz.com is a simple yet powerful toolkit designed to give you peace of mind. It includes an easy-to-use web app and a handy command-line tool to clean your text, so you can be sure you're only pasting what you see.

Best of all, it's built with your privacy first. When you use our web app, all the cleaning happens right in your browser. Your text is never sent to our servers.

Why Cleaning Your Text is So Important

The text you copy can carry invisible threats.

AI Text Watermarks: Some AI tools embed invisible "fingerprints" (like special space characters) to trace where the content came from. This can compromise your privacy, and bad actors can even copy these watermarks to create fake but "authentic-looking" content.

Hidden Malicious Code: Seemingly innocent text can contain hidden scripts. When you paste this text, it could execute commands that expose your computer to hackers, install malware, or lead to data breaches.

Our tool helps you defend against these risks by stripping away everything but the plain, safe text you intended to copy.

What You Can Do with hownz.com

✨ Instantly Clean Your Text: Get rid of invisible characters, zero-width spaces, and other junk that can be used for tracking or executing malicious commands.

🤖 Summarize with AI: Use the power of the Gemini API to get a quick, concise summary of long articles or documents.

🔧 You're in Control: Create custom lists of approved characters, add support for different languages (like Cyrillic or Greek), and even include emojis.

🕵️ Play Detective: Instead of just removing strange characters, you can choose to mark them with a '#' to see exactly what was filtered out.

🎨 Make It Your Own: Personalize the look and feel by changing the font, size, and color of the output.

🟡 Earn Rewards: We believe in making things fun. You can earn "Dopamine Dash Coins" just by using the app, customizing your settings, or sharing the tool with friends.

💻 For Developers: Our command-line tool is perfect for scripting, automation, and integrating text cleaning right into your workflow.

Our Easy-to-Use Web Tool

The website features a simple interface with two text boxes: one for your original text and one for the clean, safe version.

With our web tool, you can see your text get cleaned in real-time as you type, personalize the look and feel, summarize your cleaned text with a single click, and save the results to a .txt file or share the tool to earn rewards.

Powerful Command-Line Tool (CLI)

For developers, system administrators, or anyone who loves the terminal, the hownz CLI is a perfect fit.

To get started, install the tool globally from the official NPM registry:

npm install -g hownz

Here are a few things you can do with it:

Clean a string and see the output in your console: hownz "This is some text with weird ‎characters."

Clean a file and save it to another file using shell redirection: hownz < input.txt > output.txt

Clean a file and let the tool create a new .txt file automatically: hownz < document.txt

Clean a string and save it to a specific file with the -o flag: hownz "save this text" -o my-output.txt

Pipe the content of a website directly for cleaning: curl -sL https://hownz.com | hownz

Remove unrecognized symbols (like emojis) while keeping special language characters: hownz "text with ñ, ö, and 😀" -lm

Summarize a file using AI (requires your own API key): hownz -s < article.txt

For a complete guide with all flags and more examples, you can always check out our Admin & Developer Guide on the website or run hownz -h for a full list of commands.

A Look Inside the Project 🗺️

If you're curious about how this project is put together, here's a quick tour of the key files you'll find in the repository.

The Pages (HTML Files):

• index.html: This is the heart of the web app, where all the text cleaning magic happens.
• coins.html: Learn all about the "Dopamine Dash Coins" and how you can earn rewards.
• hello.html: A special message about the importance of human-AI collaboration.
• admin.html: The go-to guide for developers, with technical details about the command-line tool.

The Data (JSON Files):

• app.json: A multilingual dictionary containing extra language characters (like ñ, ö, Cyrillic letters, etc.).
• admin.json: The emoji dictionary! This is where all the smiley faces and symbols are stored.
• usd.json: A list that helps the tool recognize currency symbols like $, €, and £.
• package.json: The official ID card for the project, telling Node.js and NPM what it is and what it needs to run.

This structure helps keep the app organized, with a clear separation between the pages you see, the data it uses, and the code that makes it all work.

Running Locally for Development

This repository has everything you need to run the project on your own machine. You'll need a recent version of Node.js installed.

First, install the dependencies: npm install

Then, start the local development server: npm run dev

A Note on AI and API Keys

On the Website: The public website (hownz.com) uses a built-in, restricted API key for the "Summarize with AI" feature. This key will only work on our domain.

In the CLI Tool: To use the AI summarization feature (-s or --summarize) from your terminal, you'll need your own Gemini API key. Just set it as an environment variable named GEMINI_API_KEY, and you're good to go.