wssweep

A zero-config whitespace doctor. Run it on any repo and it instantly finds — and with --fix, cleans — the whitespace problems that pollute diffs and break across platforms: trailing whitespace, mixed CRLF/LF line endings, a missing final newline, extra trailing blank lines, a UTF-8 BOM, lone CRs, and tabs mixed with spaces in indentation.

pipx run wssweep
#   config.yml  (1)
#        -  mixed-eol  mixed line endings (CRLF×3, LF×1)
#
#   src/app.js  (2)
#        -  missing-final-newline  no newline at end of file
#       14: trailing-whitespace  trailing whitespace
#
#   ✖ 3 whitespace issues in 2 files  (missing-final-newline=1, mixed-eol=1, trailing-whitespace=1)

pipx run wssweep --fix   # clean them in place

No config file, no framework. Exits non-zero when it finds issues, so it drops straight into CI. Pure standard library. Also on npm (npx wssweep) — the two builds produce byte-for-byte identical output and identical fixes.

Why another whitespace tool?

Because today this takes three or four tools wired together:

• editorconfig-checker reports, but needs you to author an .editorconfig first, and it can't fix anything.
• pre-commit's trailing-whitespace / end-of-file-fixer / mixed-line-ending hooks do fix — but only inside the pre-commit framework, and they're three separate hooks. Nobody runs them ad-hoc on a fresh checkout.
• prettier fixes whitespace only as a side effect of reformatting all your code, is language-aware, and won't touch files it can't parse.
• dos2unix only does line endings.

wssweep is the one command — pip/npx, zero config — that reports all seven whitespace smells at once with line numbers and optionally fixes them in place, with a clean CI exit code, identical on Python and Node.

What it checks

Opinionated, zero-config defaults: a consistently-CRLF file is fine (only mixed endings are flagged), .bat/.cmd keep CRLF when fixed, and Markdown's two-trailing-spaces hard line break is preserved (trailing-whitespace is skipped in .md).

Usage

wssweep                       # scan the current directory
wssweep src/ docs/            # scan specific paths
wssweep --fix                 # fix in place (atomic; only files that change)
wssweep --crlf --fix          # normalize endings to CRLF instead of LF
wssweep --skip=mixed-indentation   # turn off a check
wssweep --exclude='*.min.js'  # skip paths by glob (repeatable)
wssweep --json                # machine output (byte-identical both builds)

.git, node_modules, dist, build, vendor, .venv and friends are skipped by default, as are binary files (detected by extension + a NUL-byte / non-UTF-8 content check) and files over 5 MB. --all overrides those skips.

Exit codes: 0 clean · 1 issues found · 2 error. (--fix exits 0 once everything fixable is fixed; a leftover mixed-indentation keeps it 1.)

How it works

It reads every file as raw bytes and scans a byte-faithful (latin-1) view, so it never mangles encodings and the Python and Node builds agree to the byte: line endings are classified from the bytes (never splitlines, which over-splits), "whitespace" means exactly space and tab (never \s, which differs across languages), and --fix writes raw bytes atomically (temp file + rename), touching only files that actually change and preserving file modes. Fixing is idempotent — run it twice, the second run does nothing.

Install

pip install wssweep  # or pipx run wssweep
npm i -g wssweep     # Node build, identical behaviour

Python ≥ 3.8 or Node ≥ 18. No dependencies.

License

MIT