Invisible / Zero-Width Character Detector
Developer
Paste text and the tool highlights every whitespace and invisible Unicode character: regular spaces as middle-dots, tabs as arrows, newlines as pilcrows, NBSPs in amber, zero-width characters in red, and bidi / formatting marks in fuchsia. A summary lists every invisible code point it found, and a one-click clean removes them — handy for fixing broken JSON, mangled passwords, or copy-pasted code that won't compile.
Legend
- · Regular space
- → Tab
- ¶ Newline
- ZW Zero-width character
- ␣ NBSP (U+00A0)
- FMT Other invisible / formatting char
HelloZWworld¶ This→line·has·a·tab.¶ Trailing·spaces·here.¶ ···Leading·spaces·here.¶ A␣non-breaking␣space.¶ A00ELRM·and·a02ALRE·inside.¶ ¶ A·blank·line·above.
Invisible characters found
- U+200BZero-width space×1
- U+0009Tab×1
- U+00A0NBSP (non-breaking space)×2
- U+200ELeft-to-right mark×1
- U+202ALeft-to-right embedding×1
Clean options
Helloworld This line has a tab. Trailing spaces here. Leading spaces here. A non-breaking space. ALRM and aLRE inside. A blank line above.
How to use
- Paste or type the text.
- Read the visualization — coloured dots / arrows mark whitespace, ZW marks zero-width.
- Read the 'found' list to see which Unicode points are hiding.
- Toggle clean options and copy the cleaned version.
Frequently asked questions
- What's a zero-width character?
- A Unicode code point with no width (U+200B, U+200C, U+200D, U+FEFF, …). They take up no visual space but count as characters — common culprits for 'this string is one byte longer than expected' bugs.
- What's NBSP?
- Non-breaking space (U+00A0). Looks like a normal space but doesn't break across lines. Some word processors auto-insert it after numbers and units; pasting that into JSON or code breaks things.
- What do bidi marks do?
- U+202A–U+202E (LRE / RLE / PDF / LRO / RLO) override the visual direction. They're useful for mixed-language text but a known phishing vector when sneaked into URLs or filenames.
- Is the cleaning lossless?
- Mostly — removing zero-width characters and normalizing line endings is safe for most text. Collapsing whitespace and trimming lines may change formatting you care about, so review before pasting back.
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