Invisible Character Detector
Paste any text to find the invisible characters hiding in it: zero-width spaces, word joiners, bidirectional marks, variation selectors, Unicode tags and look-alike spaces. See each character by name and code point, then copy a clean version.
What counts as an invisible character
An invisible character is a real Unicode code point that renders as nothing, or as an ordinary-looking space. It survives copy and paste, so it travels from a chatbot, web page or document into whatever you paste it into. This detector checks every character against five groups:
- Zero-width characters: zero-width space (U+200B), non-joiner (U+200C), joiner (U+200D), word joiner (U+2060), byte-order mark (U+FEFF) and the Mongolian vowel separator (U+180E).
- Bidirectional controls: left-to-right and right-to-left marks, embeddings, overrides and isolates (U+200E, U+200F, U+202A to U+202E, U+2066 to U+2069) and the Arabic letter mark (U+061C).
- Invisible and look-alike spaces: no-break space (U+00A0), narrow no-break space (U+202F), the U+2000 to U+200A space range, ideographic space (U+3000) and others.
- Variation selectors (U+FE00 to U+FE0F and U+E0100 to U+E01EF) and Unicode tag characters (U+E0000 to U+E007F).
- Other invisibles: soft hyphen (U+00AD), combining grapheme joiner (U+034F) and the Hangul choseong and jungseong fillers (U+115F, U+1160).
Why invisible characters cause problems
They break exact-match search, make two identical-looking strings compare as different, split words in the wrong place, confuse screen readers, and cause silent bugs when text is pasted into code, spreadsheets, databases or a CMS. They are also a known way to hide a watermark or a message inside ordinary text.
How to find and remove them
Paste your text above. The detector lists every invisible character it finds with its name, code point, category and count. If anything is found, a cleaned copy appears below: invisible spaces and the Unicode line and paragraph separators (U+2028, U+2029) become a normal space so words stay separated, and everything else is deleted. Your words and punctuation are unchanged.
Frequently asked questions
Is my text sent to a server?
No. Detection and cleaning run entirely in your browser. Only the optional rewrite feature sends text to a server, and only when you click it.
Why does the detector find nothing in text I think has hidden characters?
Many apps strip invisible characters on paste, and retyping or reformatting removes them too. If the characters were removed before the text reached this page, there is nothing left to find.
Can it show me where each character is?
It reports every character type with its exact count. The cleaned copy shows the text with all of them removed, so you can compare it with the original.