Find the characters you cannot see
Find zero-width spaces, no-break spaces, byte-order marks, direction controls and lookalike letters in pasted text, with code points and positions.
Your result is ready
Unicode inspector in three steps
Text that looks right can still fail to match. A search finds nothing, a password is rejected, or a value in a spreadsheet will not look up, and the reason is a character the screen draws as nothing or as an ordinary space. This lists those characters with their code points, names and where they first appear, so they can be found and removed.
What it finds
Every character outside plain printable ASCII is listed once with how many times it appears, its first line and column, its Unicode code point and its UTF-8 bytes. The characters people most often go looking for are named: no-break and narrow no-break spaces, zero-width spaces and joiners, the word joiner, soft hyphens, byte-order marks and the replacement character that marks text decoded with the wrong encoding.
Three things get a warning at the top. Invisible or unusual spacing is reported because it breaks matching. Direction controls are reported because they change the order text is shown in, which is how code can be made to read differently from how it runs. Words that mix Latin letters with Cyrillic or Greek ones are reported because those letters can look identical.
Every character, when you need it
Choose to list every character to see each one on its own line, with its position and what it is. Invisible characters are shown as a dot with their name beside them, so nothing in the listing is itself invisible. Long text is listed up to two thousand characters, with the summary still covering all of it.
Accented letters, emoji and other scripts are listed too, with their category and script, which helps when text that should be one language holds characters from another.
- 1
Paste the text that is behaving oddly
- 2
Choose whether to list every character or only the unusual ones
- 3
Read each character with its code point and where it first appears
Frequently asked questions
Why would text contain characters I cannot see?
They come with copying. Word processors, web pages and chat apps insert no-break spaces, zero-width spaces and joiners, and some files start with a byte-order mark. They are invisible on screen but make a search, a password or a spreadsheet lookup fail to match.
What are direction controls and why are they flagged?
Characters such as right-to-left override change the order text is displayed in without changing what it is. In source code or a file name that can make one thing look like another, so any of them is reported with a warning.
What does a lookalike letter warning mean?
Some Cyrillic and Greek letters look the same as Latin ones, such as the Cyrillic а and the Latin a. A word that mixes them is listed, because that is how a lookalike domain or user name is made.
Is my text uploaded?
No. Every character is examined in your browser, so passwords, keys and private messages pasted here stay on your device.