Invisible Character Detector
Paste text to find hidden zero-width spaces, joiners, BOMs, non-breaking spaces, and other invisible characters, then strip them out. Everything runs in your browser, so your text never leaves your machine.
About the Invisible Character Detector
The Invisible Character Detector scans text for hidden and unusual characters that you cannot see but that can break code, mess up search and matching, or flag text as machine-generated. It finds zero-width spaces, word joiners, byte order marks, non-breaking spaces, soft hyphens, direction marks, and other non-printable or control characters. These often slip in from copy-paste, PDFs, word processors, or AI-generated text. Everything runs in your browser, so your text is never uploaded.
How it works
- Paste or type your text into the input area.
- The tool scans every character and lists each suspicious one it finds, with its name, Unicode code point, and how many times it occurs.
- Read the total count to see how many hidden characters are present.
- Click Clean to remove the invisible characters and turn non-breaking spaces into normal spaces, then copy the cleaned text.
Features
- Detects zero-width spaces, joiners, word joiners, BOM, non-breaking and narrow no-break spaces, soft hyphens, and direction marks.
- Flags any other non-printable control characters and non-ASCII characters.
- Lists each character by name, code point (such as U+200B), and occurrence count.
- One-click Clean that strips invisible characters and normalizes non-breaking spaces.
- Copy button for the cleaned text, with a report of how many characters were removed.
Frequently asked questions
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. The scan and cleaning run entirely in your browser. Your text is never sent to a server or logged.
Why does my text have invisible characters?
They commonly come from copying out of PDFs, word processors, web pages, chat apps, and AI-generated text. Some are inserted to control line breaks or text direction, others are leftovers from encoding.
What problems do these characters cause?
They can break string comparisons, fail validation, corrupt code and config files, throw off word counts, and make two strings that look identical fail to match. A zero-width space inside a keyword or variable name is a frequent cause.
What does the Clean button change?
It removes zero-width and non-printable characters and converts non-breaking and narrow no-break spaces into normal spaces. Your visible letters, numbers, punctuation, and line breaks stay intact.
Does it flag normal accented or non-English letters?
It reports non-ASCII characters so you can review them, but the Clean button does not delete normal letters. It only removes invisible and control characters and normalizes the listed space types.