Invisible Character Detector
Find zero-width spaces, non-breaking spaces, and other hidden Unicode characters lurking in your text.
TL;DR: Invisible Character Detector is a free, browser-based tool that lets you find zero-width spaces, non-breaking spaces, and other hidden Unicode characters lurking in your text.
About this tool
Scan text for invisible Unicode characters — zero-width spaces, non-breaking spaces, directional marks, and similar characters that render as nothing but are still there in the actual text. These sneak in constantly from copy-pasting out of Word documents, emails, PDFs, and web pages, and can cause genuinely confusing bugs: a string that looks identical to another one but fails an exact-match comparison, a password that won't validate, or a URL slug with a hidden character breaking a link.
Key Features
- Detects 11 common invisible and hidden Unicode characters
- Shows exactly where each one appears, with surrounding context
- Names each character and its Unicode code point
- One-click copy of the text with all detected characters removed
- Runs entirely in your browser — your text is never uploaded
How to Use
- Paste the text you want to check.
- Click Scan.
- Review what was found, or copy the cleaned version.
When to use it
- Debugging why two strings that look identical fail an exact-match comparison in code
- Checking text copied from a Word document or PDF before pasting it into a form or database
- Investigating a URL, username, or password field that mysteriously won't validate
- Auditing a data export for hidden formatting artifacts before importing it elsewhere
- Verifying a piece of text is genuinely clean before using it somewhere hidden characters would cause a problem
Tips & limitations
- Non-breaking spaces (used to prevent a line break in the middle of, say, a person's name or a number) are extremely common in web-copied text and completely legitimate — found doesn't always mean something is wrong, just that it's there and worth knowing about
- A zero-width space is sometimes deliberately inserted to allow a long word or URL to wrap at an awkward point without a visible hyphen — another legitimate use that's still worth knowing exists in a piece of text
- This can't detect a full-width homoglyph, lookalike-letter, or other visual spoofing technique that uses a visible-but-different character — it specifically targets the class of Unicode characters that render as genuinely nothing
- Since these characters produce no visible output, the only way to actually confirm removal worked is to compare character counts, or check the cleaned text with this tool again
The 11 characters this tool checks for
| Character | Code point | Common source |
|---|---|---|
| Zero Width Space | U+200B | Copy-pasted web text, deliberate word-wrap hints |
| Non-Breaking Space | U+00A0 | Word processors, web pages ( ) |
| Zero Width Joiner / Non-Joiner | U+200D / U+200C | Emoji sequences, some scripts’ ligature control |
| Byte Order Mark (BOM) | U+FEFF | Files saved with a UTF-8 BOM encoding |
| Soft Hyphen | U+00AD | Word processors’ automatic hyphenation |
The full list this tool checks also includes left-to-right and right-to-left marks, the word joiner, and the Unicode line and paragraph separator characters — all render as zero-width or otherwise invisible, but remain present in the actual text.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Because code that compares text exactly (like checking if a password or username matches) sees the hidden character as a real, different character — two strings that look identical to a human can fail an exact match if one has an invisible character the other doesn't.
- No — non-breaking spaces are extremely common and often intentional, used to keep things like a name or number from breaking across a line. This tool reports what's present; it doesn't assume everything found is a mistake.
- No — that's a different problem: visually similar but different visible characters (like a Cyrillic а that looks like a Latin a), not the invisible characters this tool specifically targets.
- No — by definition these characters render as nothing, so removing them doesn't change how the text looks, only what's actually stored in it.
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Embed This Tool
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<iframe src="https://nexlove.org/embed/invisible-character-detector.html" width="100%" height="600" style="border:1px solid #e2e8f0;border-radius:12px" title="Invisible Character Detector — NexLove.org" loading="lazy"></iframe>