Text / Cleanup
Invisible Character Detector and Remover
Find and remove hidden characters in text: zero-width spaces, direction controls, no-break and other unusual spaces, soft hyphens, and Cyrillic or Greek look-alike letters.
Invisible Character Detector and Remover: Some Unicode characters take up no space or look like ordinary ones, so they pass unseen when text is copied: zero-width spaces and joiners, the byte order mark, left-to-right and right-to-left marks and overrides, no-break and typographic spaces, soft hyphens, hidden tag characters, and control codes. Look-alike letters, such as a Cyrillic а inside a Latin word, are a common trick in spoofed links. The cleaned text removes them, turns unusual spaces into ordinary ones, and swaps look-alikes for their Latin letters. Runs 100% locally in your browser with zero server file uploads.
- Category
- Text tools
- Runs
- In your browser
- Cost
- Free · no sign-up
- Availability
- Ready to use
Runs entirely in your browser
Common culprits
A no-break space copied from a web page stops a value from matching in a spreadsheet; a zero-width space in a password makes it fail; a byte order mark at the start of a file breaks a script; a right-to-left override disguises a file's real extension.
For spaces and tabs in general, use remove extra spaces; for a file's encoding, the text encoding detector.
Look-alike letters
Cyrillic а, е, о, р, с, and х are drawn exactly like Latin a, e, o, p, c, and x. A link or name mixing them looks normal but is a different address. The detector flags them only inside words that also contain Latin letters, so ordinary Russian or Greek text is left alone.
How to use it
- Paste the text that misbehaves.
- See each hidden character marked with its code and name.
- Choose which kinds to remove or replace, and copy the cleaned text.
Privacy & limitations
Your text stays in your browser.
Related tools
Frequently asked questions
Why would text contain invisible characters?
They come from copying out of web pages, word processors, PDFs, and chat apps; some sites add them to track copied text, and spammers use them to dodge filters.
Is it safe to remove all of them?
Mostly, but zero-width joiners are part of some emoji and of writing in scripts such as Persian and Hindi, and no-break spaces keep numbers with their units in French; untick those kinds to keep them.
What is a direction override?
A control character that reverses the display order of the text after it, so a file named photo, then the override, then gnp.exe, displays as photoexe.png although it is a program. The detector shows these in red.
Free tool · runs in your browser · no account required