Zero-width character remover

What these characters are

Zero-width space, zero-width joiner, zero-width non-joiner, the byte order mark and several directional-formatting characters render as nothing at all, but they are still real characters in the text - they can break exact-match searches, corrupt code identifiers pasted from a formatted source, or silently bloat a string with no visible sign why.

Why they turn up

Word processors, some messaging apps and certain "invisible watermarking" techniques insert them deliberately - a unique pattern of zero-width characters can be used to identify which copy of a document leaked, without changing how it visibly reads. They also arrive by accident, most often pasted out of a PDF or web page that used them for text justification or line-wrap control.

What it shows

Every zero-width or invisible character found is counted and listed by name and Unicode code point, with its position in the text, before anything is removed - so what was actually hiding in the text is visible, not just silently deleted. Clean, ordinary text reports zero found.

Privacy

Everything runs in your browser. The text you paste is never sent anywhere.

Related tools

See also the character count tool and the text case converter.