Zero-width spaces. Soft hyphens. Byte-order marks. You can't see them, but they're in your text — the x-ray view makes every hidden character visible, then removes them.
🔒 100% private — your text never leaves this browser tabUnicode defines dozens of characters that render as nothing at all: the zero-width space (U+200B), zero-width joiner and non-joiner, word joiner, soft hyphen, byte-order mark, directional marks, variation selectors and more. They exist for legitimate typesetting reasons — controlling line breaks, joining emoji, marking text direction — but they also ride along invisibly when text is copied from AI chatbots, web pages, PDFs and word processors.
Invisible characters break code and configuration files, corrupt spreadsheet lookups and database keys, defeat find-and-replace, trip up plagiarism and AI detectors, and can even be used deliberately as a hidden watermark to trace where a document came from. If a string looks identical but "doesn't match", an invisible character is usually the culprit.
Paste your text and every invisible character is rendered as a visible red chip showing its Unicode code point (like U+200B), so you can see exactly what's hiding and where. One click removes them all — zero-width characters are deleted, exotic spaces become regular spaces — while your visible text stays untouched. It all happens locally in your browser.
Mostly by copy-paste: AI chatbots, web pages, PDFs, and word processors all insert special Unicode characters — zero-width spaces, soft hyphens, byte-order marks, narrow no-break spaces — that survive the clipboard and paste invisibly into your document or code.
Yes. A zero-width space inside a variable name, API key, URL or spreadsheet formula makes it look correct while failing to match or parse. This is one of the most maddening bugs to find by eye — and one of the most common reasons strings that look identical don't compare equal.
No. Detection and removal run entirely in your browser with plain JavaScript. Your text never leaves the page.