Strip zero-width spaces, joiners and byte order marks from pasted text
Runs in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere. Updated on 25 Oct 2026.A zero-width space (U+200B) takes up no room on screen, so a password, a product code or a line of CSV can look right and still fail to match. Paste the text to see every zero-width space, joiner, word joiner and byte order mark marked with its code point, then remove them in one click. Joiners that belong to emoji or to Hindi and Persian words are kept.
Paste the text that fails to match; only Zero-width and invisible is ticked under Clean.
Find each zero-width space, joiner or byte order mark marked in the view, with its code point in the table.
Press Clean to strip them; joiners inside emoji or Hindi and Persian words are kept.
Press Copy cleaned, or Copy as escapes to see where each one was.
This detector finds characters you cannot see, or cannot tell apart, in pasted text. Each one is highlighted where it sits and listed with its position, its code point such as U+200B, its Unicode name and what it does. A one-click clean removes or replaces them, and you can choose which kinds to clean.
Five kinds are checked. Zero-width and invisible characters: zero-width spaces, joiners, word joiners, byte order marks, soft hyphens, and the tag and variation characters that can carry hidden text. Unusual spaces: no-break, thin, em and ideographic spaces and line separators, which look like ordinary spaces and break searches, CSV imports and exact comparisons. Bidirectional controls: overrides and isolates that reorder how text is shown; in source code they are the Trojan Source attack (CVE-2021-42574), where code reads one way in a review and runs another way. Control characters: codes such as NULL, ESCAPE and DELETE, plus the replacement character that marks text damaged by a wrong encoding. Lookalike letters: Cyrillic and Greek letters that match Latin ones, taken from Unicode's confusables data, and fullwidth or mathematical styled letters.
A Cyrillic or Greek letter is flagged only when it sits in a word that also has Latin letters, or when every letter of the word could pass for Latin, so ordinary Russian or Greek text is not reported. Some invisible characters are legitimate: the joiners inside emoji such as family groups, the emoji style selector, and the joiners that shape Devanagari, Bengali or Persian words. These are shown as benign and kept when cleaning.
The rest of the article, and all 6 questions about Invisible Character Detector, are on the Invisible Character Detector page.
Usually one of them contains a character you cannot see: a zero-width space, a no-break space instead of a normal one, or a Cyrillic letter that looks Latin. Paste both strings here and the difference is highlighted with its code point, so you can clean it or fix the source that produced it.
U+200B is a character that marks a possible line break but takes up no width, so it is invisible. It often arrives by copying from websites, chat apps or PDFs. Inside a password, a coupon code or a spreadsheet cell it makes an exact comparison fail even though the text looks right.
Published in 2021 as CVE-2021-42574, it hides bidirectional control characters such as RIGHT-TO-LEFT OVERRIDE (U+202E) in comments or strings. Editors then display the code in a different order from the one the compiler reads, so a reviewer approves code that behaves differently. These controls are marked in red here.
No. A zero-width joiner between two emoji, as in a family emoji, and the emoji style selector are marked benign and kept. So are joiners between letters of scripts such as Devanagari, Bengali and Persian, where they change how the letters combine. Only characters that serve no purpose there are removed.
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