What counts as an invisible character?

These are code points that produce no visible glyph but still occupy a position in the string, such as the zero-width space (U+200B), zero-width joiner (U+200D), soft hyphen (U+00AD), byte-order mark (U+FEFF), and bidirectional formatting marks.

Why do invisible characters cause problems?

They silently break string comparison, search, and JSON parsing, and they can hide watermarks or tracking fingerprints in copied text. Two strings that look identical may not be equal because one contains a hidden zero-width character.

What happens to no-break spaces?

The no-break space (U+00A0) is converted to an ordinary space rather than deleted, because it usually represents intended spacing. Every other invisible character in the list is removed entirely.

Does it remove ordinary spaces, tabs, or line breaks?

No. Visible whitespace such as regular spaces, tabs, and newlines is preserved. Only zero-width and formatting characters that carry no visible glyph are stripped.

Is my text sent to a server?

No. The stripping runs entirely in your browser, so nothing you paste is uploaded, logged, or stored anywhere.

Invisible Character Stripper

Invisible characters are code points that take up space in a string but render nothing on screen. They sneak in through copy-paste, word processors, and even deliberate text watermarking, and they quietly break comparisons, search, and parsing. This tool removes them and tells you exactly what it found.

How it works

The stripper scans your text character by character and checks each code point against a table of known invisible and formatting characters:

U+200B Zero-Width Space        U+200C/200D Zero-Width Non-Joiner/Joiner
U+00AD Soft Hyphen             U+FEFF Byte-Order Mark / ZW No-Break Space
U+200E/200F LTR/RTL Mark       U+202A-202E Bidi embedding/override
U+2060 Word Joiner            U+00A0 No-Break Space -> normal space

Matched characters are removed, except the no-break space, which is replaced with an ordinary space because it normally represents intended spacing. Visible whitespace such as regular spaces, tabs, and newlines is left untouched.

Notes and example

Paste a string like hello followed by a hidden zero-width space and then world, and the output collapses to a clean helloworld while the findings list pinpoints the U+200B by position. Use this before comparing identifiers, diffing text, or pasting into code, where a single invisible character can cause a baffling mismatch. To detect look-alike rather than invisible characters, see the homoglyph detector.