Invisible Character Tool
Strip hidden invisible characters (zero-width spaces, BOM, soft hyphens, directional marks) from pasted text, or randomly inject them at chosen positions. Inspect, count, copy and clean in one click.
Hidden character library (click to copy)
What is it
Zero-width spaces, BOM bytes, soft hyphens and directional marks are Unicode characters that take up no visual space — but they break copy-paste, URLs, anchors and search. This tool scans your text, counts every invisible character it finds, and strips them all in one click. The second tab does the opposite: it injects chosen invisible characters at random positions, which is useful for testing anti-plagiarism filters or understanding how text gets corrupted.
Notes & fun facts
Zero-width space was invented in 1968 for the CETEC terminal to allow line breaks inside long identifiers without inserting a visible hyphen. Today it shows up everywhere: copied from Twitter, pasted from Word, smuggled into usernames. An invisible character can make two strings that look identical fail a strict equality check — and you would never see why.
Origin & history
Unicode 1.1 (1993) already carried the BOM (U+FEFF) and zero-width non-joiner. The zero-width joiner and word joiner arrived in later versions. They were meant for Arabic shaping and line-breaking control, not for hiding text — but on the open web they became both a debugging nightmare and a stealthy anti-scraping trick.
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