Some text looks fine — until you paste it. Copy something from AI chat, a PDF or a website, and mysterious formatting mishaps start creeping in: broken links, search that doesn’t find a word obviously in the text, or odd line breaks. Worse maybe, text may contain hidden characters and you never notice — but somebody else does. Hidden zero-width characters are often to blame. Find out here how to spot and zap them with the zero-width space detector and remover.
First, the Hidden Vaults of Brooklyn and New York
The Brooklyn Bridge rises on two granite-Gothic towers, its cables thick as an arm holding a mile of road safely above New York’s East River. All of that you can see.
What you don’t see, of course, are the anchors — colossal iron plates rammed into the riverbanks — or the vaulted cellars carved into both ramps. Architect Washington Roebling built the bridge and spacious cellars (rented out for wine storage at a handsome profit) to keep the project afloat.
Text can be like that, too: full of hidden support and invisible bits buried underneath. Copy some text — from generative AI perhaps or the wider web — and see what’s lurking inside:
Zero-Width Space Detector and Remover: Zaps Hidden Whitespace Characters from Text
Detected Invisible Characters
All spaced out now?
Tips help fuel these email and tech how-tos.
How to Use the Zero-Width Space Detector
Time needed: 1 minute
To use the zero-width space detector and clean text of invisible characters:
- Paste the text you want to check under Text Input above.
Example:
Zerowidth spacecontains invisible characters. - Look for hidden characters made visible and marked with a color code under Detected Invisible Characters
- Optional: Purge the text of invisible characters.
Here’s how: Click Remove All Invisible Characters to zap all invisible chars from the original text; you can then edit and copy the cleaned text as needed.
Just the text: Click Copy Clean Text to copy the cleaned text (leaving the original text as is).
Their word: Unicode have an insightful FAQ entry on invisible characters.
Want to see it all?
How to View Non-Printable Unicode Characters & Code Points
Zero-Width Space Detector and Remover: FAQ
What zero-width space and invisible characters does the tool detect?
The zero-width space detector will find and remove the following Unicode characters:
Invisible spaces
- U+200B — Zero Width Space
- U+200C — Zero Width Non‑Joiner
- U+200D — Zero Width Joiner
- U+2060 — Word Joiner
- U+FEFF — Zero Width No‑Break Space (Byte Order Mark)
Conditionally visible
- U+00AD — Soft Hyphen (
­) (appears only at line breaks)
Invisible characters from mathematics
- U+2061 — Function Application
- U+2062 — Invisible Times
- U+2063 — Invisible Separator
- U+2064 — Invisible Plus
Control and deprecated characters
- U+034F — Combining Grapheme Joiner
- U+206A – U+206F — Old text‑processing control characters (deprecated)
- U+180E — Mongolian Vowel Separator (deprecated)
Together, these cover most invisible or semi-visible characters you will encounter.
Does the tool remove soft hyphens?
Yes.
The detector treats soft hyphens as only conditionally visible characters and removes them for clean text. Soft hyphens control where a word may break across lines. Used in typesetting, these characters are often unintentionally copied from websites, PDF files or text generators.
Are there legitimate uses for zero-width whitespace?
Yes.
In scripts that do not use whitespace to separate words, zero-width spaces let you tell software where word boundaries are — for clean line breaks, for example.
Zero-width characters also let you mark portmanteau words as correct for spellcheckers and prevent software from automatically turning into clickable links what it recognizes as a URL.
(First published January 2026)