Invisible character detector

Characters that hide in plain sight

Unicode contains many characters that take no visible space or look like something else: zero-width spaces, joiners, non-breaking spaces, soft hyphens, byte-order marks, direction controls and more. They have legitimate uses, for example to control how text is laid out in Arabic or Hebrew, but they also slip into text without anyone wanting them, and then they cause trouble that is hard to trace, because the text looks perfectly normal.

Where they come from

• Web pages and documents insert non-breaking spaces and soft hyphens for layout, and these travel with the text when you copy it.
• Chat apps, editors and some AI tools may add zero-width characters, sometimes as an invisible signature or watermark.
• Files created on some systems start with a byte-order mark, which then shows up as an invisible character at the beginning of the first line.
• Text from right-to-left languages carries direction marks that are invisible in the result but can reorder the text on screen.

What it finds

The detector lists every character of these families found in your text: spaces of unusual width, zero-width spaces and joiners, invisible operators, direction marks and overrides, control characters, variation selectors and tag characters. Each appears with its Unicode code, its name and its number of appearances, so you can tell at a glance a harmless soft hyphen from a suspicious sequence. Line and column numbers show where the first one sits.

Lookalike letters

The tool also flags words that mix letters from different alphabets. A Cyrillic а looks the same as a Latin a but is a different character, and swapping one for the other is a known trick to fake a name, a web address or a filename. When words of this kind are found, a warning shows some of them.

The clean copy

Below the findings you get the text with the hidden characters removed. Unusual spaces can be replaced with normal spaces, so words do not stick together, and the joiners that hold emoji together, such as the family emoji or the skin-tone modifiers, are kept by default so that your emoji do not fall apart.

What it does not do

The tool cannot know whether a hidden character was put there for a good reason, such as in a text that genuinely needs direction marks. If you write in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian or scripts that use joiners, check the result before using it. For a broader clean-up of text copied from the web or from a PDF, use the text cleaner.