Invisible character cleaner
Paste text, see every hidden character, clean it in one click.
Clean
Paste text to see what is hidden in it.
Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
Questions
What does this tool do?
The Invisible character cleaner finds the characters in pasted text that print nothing or pass for something else — zero-width spaces, non-breaking spaces, soft hyphens, direction marks, control characters, curly quotes and dash variants — and lists each one with its code point and count. One click removes the invisible ones, turns odd spaces into ordinary spaces and straightens the punctuation; each of the three can be switched off.
Which characters does it find?
Forty-four characters and ranges in three families. Invisible: zero-width spaces and joiners, the byte order mark, soft hyphens, direction marks, control characters. Spaces that are not the ordinary space: non-breaking, narrow, typographic, full-width. Punctuation that passes for the plain kind: curly quotes, guillemets, primes, en and em dashes, the minus sign, the ellipsis.
Where do they come from?
Copy and paste from Word, PDFs, web pages and AI chats carries them along. They are harmless to read and a nuisance for search, code, spreadsheets, form fields and word counts.
Does it change my visible text?
Remove invisible and Normalise spaces change nothing you can see. Normalise punctuation does: curly quotes, dashes and the ellipsis become their plain forms. Switch it off to keep the typography.
Will it break emoji?
No. Some emoji are several characters held together by a zero width joiner — a family, a flag with a rainbow — and a joiner between two emoji is left alone. A joiner between letters is still found and removed.
Are tabs and line breaks kept?
Yes. Tab, newline and carriage return are left alone. The Unicode line and paragraph separators, which only some programs honour, become ordinary line breaks.