Invisible Character Inspector — Detect Hidden Characters
Inspect text for invisible Unicode characters like zero-width spaces, BOM, control characters, and Bidirectional overrides. Clean and copy safe text.
Invisible Character Inspector
Detect hidden and invisible Unicode characters in your text. These characters can be zero-width spaces, byte order marks (BOM), control codes, bidirectional overrides, and other non-rendering Unicode points. Use this tool to clean up pasted text, detect invisible watermarks, or troubleshoot text processing issues.
What It Detects
The inspector scans and identifies various categories of hidden characters in your text input, assessing their potential impact:
| Category | Description | Risk |
|---|---|---|
| Zero-Width Space | U+200B and similar | High |
| BOM / Zero-Width No-Break | U+FEFF | High |
| Bidirectional Overrides | LRO, RLO, etc. | High |
| Soft Hyphen | U+00AD | Medium |
| Control Characters | BEL, ESC, FS, etc. | High |
| Format Characters | Various Unicode format codes | Varies |
Why Detect Invisible Characters?
- Security — Malicious actors can hide content or bidirectional overrides (such as RLO) in text to trick users or spoof URLs.
- Copy-Paste Issues — Hidden characters copied from web scrapers or PDF documents can break backend parsing and databases.
- Text Processing — Debug why your string manipulation, matching, or search queries fail on otherwise identical-looking text.
- Watermarking Detection — Verify if any copied text contains hidden watermarks used to track content sources.
How to Use
- Paste or type your text directly into the main inspection textarea.
- Click Inspect to run the analysis instantly (or simply type, as the tool auto-runs on input).
- Use the Visual tab to see color-coded indicators showing exactly where the hidden characters reside. Click any character badge to view complete codepoint details.
- Explore the Details tab for a comprehensive breakdown of all suspicious characters found, including counts, categories, and one-click removal tools.
- Go to the Clean Text tab to preview and copy the polished text with all invisible characters removed, or click Apply to Input to replace the current text.
- Use the Hex/Codepoint tab to audit the raw numeric representation of the entire string.
FAQs
What is the Invisible Character Inspector?
This tool detects hidden Unicode characters in text that are invisible or hard to see, like zero-width spaces, BOM characters, control codes, and Bidirectional text overrides. These characters can be used for invisible watermarking, tricking copy-paste, or hiding content.
What characters are detected?
The tool detects: Zero-Width Space (ZWSP), BOM/UTF-8 markers, Soft Hyphens, Bidirectional overrides (LRO, RLO, LRE, RLE), Word Joiner, Hangul fillers, and many more invisible Unicode characters.
How do I use it?
Paste or type text in the input area and click 'Inspect'. The tool will analyze all characters and highlight invisible ones with color-coded badges. You can view details, copy clean text, or remove invisible characters.
Why is this useful?
Useful for: verifying copied text hasn't been tampered with, cleaning up pasted text from websites, detecting invisible watermarks, debugging text processing issues, and security auditing.
What do the colors mean?
Yellow = Zero-width/invisible chars, Red = Control characters, Purple = Bidirectional overrides, Green = Format characters, Blue = Special space characters. High risk items are marked with danger badges.