Detect, visualise, count and remove invisible Unicode characters from any text. Finds zero-width spaces, non-breaking spaces, soft hyphens, bidirectional marks, word joiners, and all other hidden characters that cause invisible bugs.
Paste text you suspect contains invisible characters — copied from PDFs, web pages, Word documents, social media, or code. The tool instantly scans every character, including those with zero visible width.
Each invisible character type found is listed with its Unicode code point, name, count, and position. The visualiser view replaces invisible characters with visible markers so you can see exactly where they sit inside your text.
Click Remove All Invisible Characters to strip every detected hidden character and copy the clean result. Or use the selective remove options to strip specific types while keeping others (for example, keeping non-breaking spaces while removing zero-width spaces).
Invisible characters are Unicode code points that have no visible glyph — they take up no space on screen (or a fixed space), are not rendered visually, but are real characters that exist in the string. Common examples include the zero-width space (U+200B), non-breaking space (U+00A0), soft hyphen (U+00AD), zero-width non-joiner (U+200C), zero-width joiner (U+200D), left-to-right mark (U+200E), and word joiner (U+2060).
They enter text through multiple routes: copy-pasting from PDFs (which insert soft hyphens at line-break points), copying from web pages (which use non-breaking spaces for layout), pasting from Word or Google Docs (which use smart spacing), using social media fancy text generators (which embed zero-width characters for styling), importing from certain CMS editors, or receiving content from non-English text systems that use bidirectional marks.
They cause string comparison failures (the string "hello" with a hidden zero-width space is not equal to "hello"), CSV and JSON parsing errors, API authentication failures (a password with an invisible character will not match during login), unexpected line-break behaviour in code, broken search and replace operations, and SEO issues where crawlers see a different string than humans. They are notoriously difficult to diagnose because the text looks completely normal to the eye.
A zero-width space (U+200B) has literally zero width — it is completely invisible and takes up no space at all. It can be used to allow line breaks at positions where they would not normally occur. A non-breaking space (U+00A0) has the same width as a regular space character but prevents a line break at its position. Both are invisible in most editors, but the non-breaking space visually looks like a space while the zero-width space looks like nothing.
Yes. Non-breaking spaces are legitimately used in typography to prevent awkward line breaks (between a number and its unit: "100 kg"). Zero-width joiners are used in emoji sequences (combining emoji with a ZWJ creates compound emoji like family combinations). Bidirectional marks are needed in mixed left-to-right and right-to-left text. This tool shows you what is present and lets you decide what to remove.
Yes. PDFs store text differently from how it appears on screen. When you copy from a PDF, the extracted text often contains soft hyphens (U+00AD) at hyphenation points, non-breaking spaces for fixed layout positions, and sometimes ligature characters that were used for typographic rendering. This tool will detect and display all of these, letting you clean the text before using it elsewhere.
