Unicode & Invisible Character Inspector

Where hidden characters come from

Most arrive by copy and paste. Word processors and web pages add non-breaking spaces, some content systems add zero-width spaces, and editors for Arabic or Hebrew text add direction marks. They cause bugs that are hard to see: a username that looks right fails to match, grep misses a word, and Python rejects source code containing a non-breaking space. Zero-width joiners inside emoji are legitimate, so check what a character is part of before stripping it.

Direction overrides

The right-to-left override, U+202E, reverses the display of the text after it. It has been used to disguise file names, making invoice followed by U+202E and fdp.exe display as invoiceexe.pdf. In 2021 the same trick, named Trojan Source, showed that source code could display differently from how it compiles. Treat any override found in a file name, code, or a message as suspicious.

Characters not flagged

The invisible list covers the common cases. Other characters that render as nothing, including the soft hyphen U+00AD, the word joiner U+2060, the direction isolates U+2066–U+2069, and variation selectors such as U+FE0F, appear as ordinary extended characters. Scan the code point column for them, or compare the counts: text whose character count is higher than what you can see has something hidden in it.

How to use it

1. Type or paste text into the input box.
2. Review character counts, UTF-8 byte breakdown, and zero-width warnings.
3. Copy the detailed code point list.

Privacy & limitations

Text inspection takes place entirely in local browser memory.