Based on the answers by Op De Cirkel and noackjr, the following is what I do for general string cleaning: 1. trimming leading or trailing whitespaces, 2. dos2unix, 3. mac2unix, 4. removing all "invisible Unicode characters" except whitespaces:
myString.trim.replaceAll("\r\n", "\n").replaceAll("\r", "\n").replaceAll("[\\p{Cc}\\p{Cf}\\p{Co}\\p{Cn}&&[^\\s]]", "")
Tested with Scala REPL.