Invisible Character Detector
Scan text for exotic invisible Unicode characters — zero-width space, zero-width joiner/non-joiner, non-breaking space, BOM, soft hyphen, and word joiner — and highlight each one in place with a count by type.
3 Invisible Characters Found
Zero-Width Space (U+200B)
Non-Breaking Space (U+00A0)
Soft Hyphen (U+00AD)
Highlighted Text
How to Use the Invisible Character Detector
Paste or type text into the input field. The tool scans every character for a set of exotic invisible Unicode characters — zero-width space, zero-width joiner, zero-width non-joiner, non-breaking space, the byte order mark (BOM), soft hyphen, and word joiner — that don't render visibly but can still cause problems in code, URLs, or form inputs. Any match is shown inline as a highlighted marker in the read-only text panel, with a count of each type found on the left.
Example
Pasting text that looks normal but contains a hidden non-breaking space, a zero-width space, and a soft hyphen shows all three highlighted inline in the text panel, with counts of 1 for each type listed on the left.
Common Use Cases
- Debugging why a pasted URL or code snippet fails to work despite looking correct.
- Checking text copied from a PDF or webpage for hidden characters before using it in code.
- Auditing form input or CMS content for invisible characters that could break downstream processing.
FAQs
- How is this different from the Whitespace Cleaner? The Whitespace Cleaner targets ordinary spaces, tabs, and empty lines — the whitespace you can usually see or expect. This tool detects exotic invisible Unicode characters, like zero-width spaces and the byte order mark, that are often invisible even when copy-pasted and can cause subtle bugs in URLs, code, or form inputs that regular whitespace cleaning won't catch.
- Does this tool remove the invisible characters it finds? No — this tool only detects and highlights them for review without changing your text. Use the Unicode Space Remover to actually strip them out.
- Why would invisible characters cause bugs? Characters like zero-width spaces or the BOM can silently break string comparisons, URL parsing, form validation, or code that expects plain ASCII, even though the text looks completely normal on screen.