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
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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.
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.
Want to see it all?
How to View Non-Printable Unicode Characters & Code Points
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.
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