A zero-width space is a character that renders as nothing at all — until it breaks your code, your spreadsheet or your search. See every one, then delete them all.
🔒 100% private — your text never leaves this browser tabU+200B is a Unicode character with no visible width: it exists to mark legitimate line-break points in scripts without spaces. Its siblings — the zero-width non-joiner (U+200C), zero-width joiner (U+200D) and word joiner (U+2060) — control how characters connect. All render as nothing, survive copy-paste, and travel invisibly through emails, chats, PDFs, web pages and AI chatbot output.
An API key that "doesn't match", a variable that "isn't defined", a spreadsheet lookup that fails on identical-looking values, a search that can't find text you can plainly see — zero-width characters are one of the most maddening classes of bug because the evidence is literally invisible. They're also used deliberately: sprinkled through text as a fingerprint to trace where a copy came from.
Paste your text and the x-ray view renders every zero-width character as a visible red chip with its code point (U+200B, U+200C…), so you know exactly what's hiding and where. One click deletes them all — along with the other invisible characters covered by the broader Invisible Character Remover, which also handles soft hyphens, byte-order marks and exotic spaces.
Paste it above — the x-ray view renders each zero-width character as a visible chip labeled with its Unicode code point, so nothing stays hidden.
Copy-paste, almost always: AI chatbots, web pages, PDFs, rich-text editors and some messaging apps insert them. Some sites add them deliberately as an invisible watermark.
No — the characters have zero width, so the text looks identical after removal. It just stops breaking parsers, searches and comparisons.