Invisible Character Detector
Find and remove invisible Unicode characters — zero-width spaces, bidi overrides, soft hyphens and BOMs hiding in your text — 100% in your browser, no upload
Paste or type some text to scan it for invisible characters.
🔒 Your text is scanned entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
What are hidden characters?
Some Unicode characters take up no visible space yet sit right inside your text: zero-width spaces (U+200B), the zero-width joiner and non-joiner, the byte order mark (BOM), soft hyphens, and bidirectional controls that can silently reorder how text is displayed. They get pasted in when you copy from a website, PDF, chat app or word processor, and they can break search, string comparison, form validation, code and URLs. This tool scans your text, flags every invisible character with its position, name and code point, and gives you a cleaned copy with them stripped out.
Why it matters
A single zero-width space can make two identical-looking strings compare as different, break a password field, or corrupt a CSV export. Bidirectional override characters are the basis of Trojan Source attacks, where source code looks harmless but compiles to something else. Because everything runs locally in your browser, you can safely inspect sensitive or untrusted text without uploading it anywhere.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a hidden character?
Any character in the Unicode Format (Cf) category: zero-width space, joiner and non-joiner, the BOM, soft hyphen, and the left-to-right and right-to-left embedding, override and isolate controls, plus the bidi marks. Ordinary spaces, tabs and line breaks are left untouched.
Does cleaning change my visible text?
Not the characters: only invisible ones are removed, and the joiners that hold an emoji together (👩💻, the rainbow flag, a subdivision flag) are kept so it stays whole. But removing a zero-width joiner or non-joiner can change how Persian, Arabic or Indic letters connect, and removing bidirectional controls changes the order mixed-direction text is shown in — which is exactly why you would remove a smuggled one.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. Detection and cleaning happen entirely in your browser, so it works offline and your text never leaves your device.