It renders as nothing but is still a real character. If it lands inside a CSS class or variable name, the interpreter sees two different strings even though they look identical — causing silent match failures.
Free Developer Tool
Invisible & Non-Printable Character Viewer
Reveal zero-width spaces, non-breaking spaces, byte order marks, control characters, and smart-quote look-alikes hiding in copy-pasted text — the invisible bugs that break code, CSS classes, and JSON.
- ✔ Zero-width space detection
- ✔ BOM & control character detection
- ✔ Smart-quote look-alikes
- ✔ One-click cleaning
- ✔ Nothing uploaded
- ✔ Free Forever
The Bug You Can't See
Text copied from Word documents, PDFs, Slack, or certain websites often carries invisible passengers — a zero-width space silently splitting a CSS class name, a non-breaking space that looks identical to a regular space but fails a string comparison, a byte order mark (BOM) at the start of a PHP file causing "headers already sent" errors, or curly smart quotes that break JSON parsing.
This tool makes every character in your text visible — flagging control characters, zero-width and formatting characters, unusual space variants, and "look-alike" typographic characters that are visible but often unintended — so you can find and fix the actual source of a bug that looked impossible to spot.
How It Works
1. Paste Your Text
Paste any text that's behaving unexpectedly.
2. Inspect
Every hidden or unusual character is highlighted inline with a labeled badge.
3. Review Details
See a full table of each flagged character, its code point, and what it is.
4. Get Clean Text
Copy a cleaned version with invisible characters stripped and look-alikes normalized.
| Category | Name | Code Point | Notes |
|---|
Common Culprits
Characters That Cause Real Bugs
control Control Characters
ASCII codes 0-31 and 127 — leftover from teletype-era control signals. Sometimes appear in text pasted from terminal output or corrupted file conversions.
invisible Zero-Width Characters
Zero-width space, joiner, and non-joiner render nothing but still count as characters — famous for silently breaking usernames, class names, and string equality checks.
space Unicode Space Variants
Non-breaking space, em space, thin space — visually identical to a regular space but fail exact string matches and can break CSV parsing or CLI arguments.
lookalike Look-Alike Characters
Curly quotes and em-dashes from Word or iOS auto-correct — visible and often fine in prose, but break JSON, code strings, and shell commands.
FAQsInvisible Character Viewer
Why would a zero-width space break my code?
What is a BOM and why does it cause errors?
A byte order mark (U+FEFF) at the start of a file, often added by Notepad. In PHP it causes "headers already sent" errors; in JSON/CSV parsers it can cause a parse failure on the first line.
Is this the same as the Unicode Converter tool?
No. Unicode Converter transforms text between encoding formats. This tool inspects existing text for invisible or unusual characters already present. They're complementary and cross-linked.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. All analysis happens entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent to any server.