👻Invisible Character Detector

Detect and remove invisible Unicode characters, zero-width spaces, and hidden formatting.

Input Text

About Invisible Character Detector

Scan any text for invisible and hidden Unicode characters that are not visible to the naked eye but can cause bugs, break string comparisons, and produce unexpected behavior in applications. Detects zero-width spaces, zero-width joiners, soft hyphens, byte order marks, right-to-left overrides, and other non-printing characters. View, highlight, and optionally remove them in one click.

How to Use Invisible Character Detector

1
Paste your text
Enter the text you want to scan for hidden characters.
2
Review detections
The tool highlights each invisible character found, showing its Unicode name, code point, and position in the text.
3
Remove or keep
Click Remove All to strip invisible characters, or selectively remove specific ones while keeping others.

Common Use Cases

Debugging mysterious string comparison failures in code
Cleaning text copied from PDFs and web pages before processing
Detecting hidden tracking characters in pasted content
Sanitizing user input to prevent zero-width character injection attacks

Frequently Asked Questions

What are invisible characters?

Invisible characters are Unicode code points that have no visible glyph but occupy space in a string. Examples include zero-width spaces (U+200B), zero-width joiners (U+200D), soft hyphens (U+00AD), and byte order marks (U+FEFF).

How do invisible characters get into my text?

They are often introduced by copy-pasting from web pages, word processors, PDFs, or rich-text editors. Some websites intentionally embed them for tracking or fingerprinting purposes.

Can invisible characters cause bugs?

Yes, they can break string comparisons, cause unexpected validation failures, make identical-looking strings unequal, and even introduce security vulnerabilities through homograph attacks or bidirectional text overrides.