Hidden Character Detector & Cleaner
See the invisible characters hiding in your text, and strip them out.
| Type | Character | Code point | Count |
|---|
Click a row to highlight those characters above.
How to use the Hidden Character Detector & Cleaner
- Paste the text you want to check.
- Every hidden or unusual character appears as a coloured badge in place, with a summary table below.
- Choose what to clean: invisible characters, odd spaces, look-alike letters.
- Copy the cleaned text.
About this tool
Text can carry characters you cannot see. Zero-width spaces and joiners slip in from web pages and chat apps, break searches and passwords, and can act as a fingerprint that identifies who copied a document. No-break and thin spaces make code fail with puzzling errors. Direction overrides such as U+202E can make a file ending in "fdp.exe" display as if it ended in "exe.pdf". Unicode tag characters can even hide a complete sentence that is invisible on screen but still read by software, a trick used to smuggle instructions into AI chatbots.
This detector scans every code point and marks each suspicious one as a visible badge right where it sits, so you can see exactly where it is. It also catches look-alike letters: a Cyrillic "а" or Greek "Ο" mixed into an English word looks identical but is a different character, which is how lookalike domains and filter-dodging spam work.
Cleaning is selective. Emoji that legitimately use joiners and variation selectors, such as family emoji or regional flags, are left intact by default. Your text is analysed in your browser and is never saved or uploaded.
Frequently asked questions
What is a zero-width space?
U+200B is a character with no width at all. It is meant to mark where a long word may wrap, but it often sneaks in when copying from websites and causes "identical" text to not match.
Is my text sent anywhere?
No. The analysis runs entirely in your browser tab. Nothing is uploaded, logged or stored, not even in local storage.
Can hidden characters be used to track me?
Yes. Some services insert unique patterns of invisible characters into text so that a leaked copy can be traced back to a specific account. Cleaning removes those patterns.
Will cleaning break emoji?
Not by default. Joiners and variation selectors that are part of a valid emoji sequence are kept. Untick "Keep emoji intact" to remove them too.
Why is a normal-looking letter flagged?
It is a letter from another alphabet, usually Cyrillic or Greek, that looks the same as a Latin one. Inside an English word it is almost always a mistake or a deliberate trick.