Invisible Character Remover
Names every character in your text that you cannot see, and takes out the ones you did not want.
- 2 runs
- ~1 ms
- 100% success
Tool input
Overview
About this tool
Finds zero-width spaces, byte-order marks, non-breaking spaces, direction overrides and substituted smart quotes, says what each one is and where it came from, and hands back a cleaned copy — while carefully keeping the joiners that are holding your emoji together.
Instructions
How to use it
Paste the text and read the second block: it names every character worth naming, how many there were, and where that kind usually comes from.
Where they come from
- PDFs — soft hyphens, left behind by justified text.
- Word processors — curly quotes and en dashes, substituted as you typed.
- Design tools — thin and hair spaces used for kerning.
- Other caption tools — zero-width spaces, used to fake line breaks.
- Anything exported from a spreadsheet — a byte-order mark on the very first character.
Why it matters
An invisible character inside a hashtag or a handle stops it matching. The tag looks perfect and reaches nobody, and no platform tells you. A non-breaking space where an ordinary space should be does the same thing to a search.
Questions
Frequently asked
What is a zero-width space?
A Unicode character that occupies no width and draws nothing. It is legitimate for controlling line breaks in long words, and it is also what gets pasted into captions by tools that fake blank lines with it.
Will this break my emoji?
No. A zero-width joiner sitting between two pictographs is reported as load-bearing and left in place. Only joiners in the middle of ordinary text are removed.
Should I straighten smart quotes?
Usually not — curly quotes read better. Straighten them when the text is going into a URL, a filename, a code block, or anywhere it will be compared exactly.
Is my text stored anywhere?
No. The check runs on the request and nothing is written down.
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