Detect, reveal and remove invisible Unicode characters — zero-width spaces, NBSP, bidi marks and more.
Some Unicode characters take up no space on screen and yet are really there: zero-width spaces, word joiners, byte order marks, soft hyphens, directional marks. Others look exactly like a normal space but behave differently — the non-breaking space, the narrow and typographic spaces, the ideographic space. They sneak into text when you copy from web pages, Word documents, PDFs and chat apps, and they are a classic cause of mysterious failures: a password that "is correct" but gets rejected, code that will not compile, a spreadsheet lookup that never matches, a URL that 404s.
This tool scans your text character by character against a table of known invisible and deceptive characters — the zero-width family (U+200B, U+200C, U+200D, U+2060, U+FEFF), the soft hyphen, the left-to-right and right-to-left marks, the directional formatting range (U+202A–202E) that can visually reorder text and is a known phishing trick, and every atypical space from U+2000 to U+200A plus the NBSP, narrow NBSP and ideographic space. Revealing replaces each one with a visible marker such as [ZWSP] or [NBSP], and a panel shows exactly how many of each type were found.
The "Clean" button produces a version safe to use: genuinely invisible characters are removed, and the space impostors are converted to a plain space, so the visible text stays identical. This matters beyond debugging — invisible characters are also used to watermark and fingerprint text, so checking what you paste is a small privacy habit worth having. The scan runs entirely in your browser: nothing you paste is transmitted, logged or stored.
A Unicode character (U+200B) that occupies no visible space but still counts as a character. It exists to mark word-break opportunities, but in practice it sneaks into copied text and breaks string comparisons, passwords and code.
Very likely an invisible character came along with the copy. Paste the text here and reveal it: a single [ZWSP] or [NBSP] where a space should be is enough to make a comparison fail or a compiler complain.
No. Cleaning only removes characters that have no visual presence and converts look-alike spaces to a regular space. Every letter, number, emoji and normal space stays exactly as it was.
Yes. A unique pattern of zero-width characters can be embedded in text to watermark it and identify who leaked or shared it. Revealing and cleaning a text before publishing it removes that kind of fingerprint.
No. Detection and cleaning run 100% in JavaScript on your device — appropriate for a privacy tool. Nothing is sent to any server.
Vai.la turns any URL into a short link with click statistics, QR Code and your own biolink.
Vai.la is not responsible for how the tools are used or for decisions made based on their results.