Are prefix and suffix treated as regular expressions?

No. Both are inserted literally, so punctuation and backslashes have no special replacement meaning.

What counts as a blank line when skipping is enabled?

An empty line or a line containing only whitespace remains exactly unchanged, including its whitespace.

What happens to CRLF endings and a trailing newline?

CRLF, CR, and LF are recognized, and generated output uses LF consistently. A trailing newline creates a final empty logical line, which follows the selected blank-line policy.

No. Decoration, preview generation, and TXT download creation run locally in the browser, and the text is never uploaded to Lizely.

Add Prefix to Each Line Safely: Predictable Results

Adding a prefix to each line safely means applying a literal prefix to every logical input line without rewriting that line's internal content, order, tabs, spaces, or letter case. The Add Prefix and Suffix to Lines tool performs one controlled operation: prefix + original line + suffix for every line selected by the blank-line policy. It accepts up to 1,000,000 characters, recognizes Windows CRLF, classic Mac CR, and Unix LF boundaries, and shows the exact generated string in a preview before a UTF-8 TXT download. Prefix and suffix values are plain strings, not regular expressions, replacement tokens, Markdown, HTML, or code, so punctuation such as brackets, quotes, dollar signs, backslashes, asterisks, and parentheses is inserted exactly as entered. Processing stays in the browser, and the text is never uploaded to Lizely. Safe use also means checking blank-line handling, normalized LF output, and the final empty logical line created by a trailing newline. That makes the operation suitable for mechanical list preparation when you need repeatable boundaries and a result you can inspect before export.

What Makes the Result Predictable

Here, “safe” means predictable scope and explicit rules, not that the tool will validate the result for every downstream format. It treats each logical line as a unit and concatenates only the text you supply around it.

Safety concern	Defined tool behavior	Why it matters
Original line content	Preserves line order and the original content within each line, including leading and trailing spaces, internal spaces, tabs, and letter case.	Existing content is not silently cleaned or reformatted.
Affix meaning	Inserts the prefix and suffix exactly as entered, without regular-expression or token interpretation.	Punctuation cannot unexpectedly become a pattern or replacement command.
Blank-line coverage	Uses an explicit option for empty and whitespace-only lines. The choice changes which lines are decorated but never deletes a line.	Blank records and intentional spacing remain under your control.
Output format	Normalizes recognized line boundaries to LF and makes the generated string available as UTF-8 TXT.	The result is predictable plain text rather than rendered styling.

The boundaries matter too. The tool does not trim lines, collapse internal spaces, remove tabs, sort entries, deduplicate values, find and replace substrings, add sequential numbers, parse CSV fields, edit Word documents, or infer syntax. If a downstream format has its own escaping rules, verify or escape the result separately.

Set Up the Lines and Affix Text

Establish the input boundary and the exact text to insert before generating anything:

Check the input size. Paste or type up to 1,000,000 characters. Empty input creates a visible error.
Check both affixes. A prefix and suffix may each contain up to 200 Unicode characters, but at least one must be non-empty. Exceeded limits create visible errors.
Keep the affixes literal. Characters that have meaning in scripts, markup, regular expressions, or spreadsheets are still inserted exactly as plain text.

A space is significant. Leading and trailing spaces remain part of the original line, while internal spaces and tabs remain untouched. The tool does not move the affixes inside those spaces; it places the prefix before the original line and the suffix after it. Emoji and non-Latin text can also be inserted, although their final display still depends on the font and downstream editor.

Add the Prefix to Every Line

Paste or type the source lines. Put the text in the input area and keep the lines in the order you want. The tool preserves that order, but it does not sort the content for you.
Enter a prefix, a suffix, or both. For example, use - as a prefix for list markers or ( and ) as the prefix and suffix for an identifier. At least one affix must contain text.
Choose whether blank lines stay unchanged. With Leave blank lines unchanged enabled, both empty lines and lines containing only whitespace are returned exactly as they were. With the option disabled, every logical line, including blank and whitespace-only lines, is decorated.
Generate the result. The exact transformed text appears in a preformatted preview. Inspect the preview instead of estimating the output from the input.
Review and download the current result. Download the UTF-8 TXT file after checking the preview. If you edit the input, prefix, suffix, or blank-line setting, the old result is cleared and its download URL is revoked, so you must generate the updated result again.

Handle Blank Lines and Final Boundaries

The blank-line option affects coverage, not line deletion. Its exact behavior is:

Logical input line	Leave blank lines unchanged: enabled	Blank-line decoration: disabled
Empty line	Returned exactly unchanged	Receives the prefix and suffix
Line containing only whitespace	Returned unchanged, including its spaces or tabs	Receives the prefix and suffix
Line containing text	Receives the prefix and suffix	Receives the prefix and suffix
Final empty line represented by a trailing newline	Remains empty	Receives the prefix and suffix

A trailing newline creates a final empty logical line rather than serving as a purely visual marker. When blank lines are decorated, that final line receives both affixes; when blank lines are skipped, it remains empty. This deliberate rule prevents the transformation from silently losing the final line boundary represented by the input.

Windows CRLF, classic Mac CR, and Unix LF endings are all recognized. Generated output uses LF consistently, so the downloaded file does not mix line-ending styles.

Inspect the Result Before Export

The preview uses a preformatted region that preserves spaces and newlines. A long line may wrap visually because of the available screen width, but that wrap does not add a real newline to the downloaded file. This distinction is important when counting lines or checking a strict output format.

The downloadable file contains the generated string, not copied rendered HTML. It is UTF-8 plain text with no byte-order mark, rich-text styling, spreadsheet quoting, CSV escaping, filename-derived prefix, or automatic delimiter detection. If the result will feed a format that requires escaped quotes or other special handling, check that format separately before using the file.

Practical Prefix and Suffix Jobs

This operation fits repetitive tasks where every line needs the same surrounding text:

List markers: Add a literal prefix such as - to each nonblank item.
Fixed paths: Place the same directory or base path before every line when the values are relative paths.
Parentheses or quotes: Surround identifiers with literal punctuation, checking separately if the values contain characters that require escaping.
Logging tags: Add a fixed prefix such as [INFO] to each message.
Simple SQL or HTML fragments: Insert literal delimiters, tags, indentation, or closing punctuation without asking the tool to parse or repair the surrounding syntax.

Know the Tool's Boundaries

The tool is intentionally narrow. Use Add Line Numbers when the prefix must be a sequential number, and use Find and Replace when existing substrings inside lines must change. Add Prefix and Suffix to Lines does not parse CSV records, edit a Word document, identify a filename to use as the prefix, detect delimiters, or infer the syntax of each line. It is the appropriate choice when the required change is the same literal text around every selected line.

Run a Final Safety Check

Confirm that the prefix and suffix contain exactly the characters you intend.
Confirm whether empty and whitespace-only lines should be decorated or skipped.
Inspect the first, last, and visually wrapped lines in the preview.
Check the treatment of a trailing newline before relying on the final line.
Verify any downstream escaping or delimiter rules separately.
Download only the current generated result after all controls are finalized.

The complete workflow is straightforward: paste or type the lines, enter literal affixes, set the blank-line policy, generate the exact result, inspect it, and download the UTF-8 TXT file.