About this invisible character remover
Some Unicode characters take up no space on screen but still sit in your text: zero-width spaces, soft hyphens, byte order marks, and marks that change text direction. They slip in when you copy from web pages, PDFs, word processors, and chat apps, and then a password is rejected, a URL fails, code will not compile, or a search misses a word that is clearly there. This tool finds more than 30 kinds of hidden characters, shows each one by name and code point and marks where it was, and gives you the text without them.
How to remove invisible characters
- Paste the text. Paste the text that causes trouble, or press an example. An example only fills the box.
- Press Find and remove. The clean text appears below, with a table of the hidden characters found and a view that marks where each one was.
- Copy the clean text. Press Copy clean text and paste it back where you need it.
Frequently asked questions
Which invisible characters are removed?
Zero-width spaces and joiners, word joiners, soft hyphens, byte order marks, Unicode line and paragraph separators, left-to-right and right-to-left marks, embeddings, overrides, and isolates, invisible math operators, Hangul fillers, and emoji variation selectors outside emoji. Normal spaces, tabs, and line breaks are kept.
Will this break my emoji?
Not with Keep joiners inside emoji on. Emoji such as 👨👩👧 are built from several emoji glued together by zero-width joiners, and ❤️ uses a variation selector. Those are kept when they sit next to an emoji and removed everywhere else.
Are non-breaking spaces removed?
No. A non-breaking space is visible as a space. To turn non-breaking spaces into normal ones, use Remove Leading and Trailing Spaces or Remove Spaces.
Why is a right-to-left override dangerous?
It reverses the display order of the text after it, so a file named invoice followed by an override and "fdp.exe" is displayed as "invoiceexe.pdf". Removing the override shows the real name, which ends in .exe.
Why would text contain a soft hyphen?
Word processors and some websites insert soft hyphens as hints for where a long word may break at the end of a line. They are invisible in the middle of a line, but they stay in copied text and split words for search and code.