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Invisible Character Remover

Strip zero-width and hidden characters from pasted text.

Paste your text

Remove zero-width characters Normalise odd spaces Remove control characters Straighten smart quotes and dashes Strip emoji variation selectors Trim trailing spaces on each line

0Hidden chars found

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Clean text

Zero-width and look-alike characters sneak in when you copy from PDFs, Word, web pages and chat apps. They are invisible on screen but they break search, spoil form validation, and can make two identical-looking strings compare as different.

About the Invisible Character Remover

Text copied from PDFs, Word, web pages and AI chats often carries zero-width spaces, non-breaking spaces, soft hyphens and direction marks that you cannot see but which break search, form validation and string comparisons.

This finds every one of them, tells you exactly which characters were present and how many, and gives you a clean version. Smart quotes and em dashes can be straightened at the same time.

Frequently asked questions

Why does my text have hidden characters?

Copy and paste carries invisible formatting from the source. PDFs add soft hyphens, web pages add zero-width spaces, and word processors add non-breaking spaces and curly quotes.

Can hidden characters be used to track text?

Yes — zero-width characters can encode an invisible fingerprint. Running text through this tool removes that kind of marker.