How to use the Unicode Character Inspector
- Paste the text that behaves strangely — a slug that won’t match, code that won’t compile, a CMS field with a mysterious gap.
- Look at the summary: invisible characters, unusual spaces and lookalike letters are counted and highlighted in red or amber.
- Click any character in the strip to jump to its row with name, code point, UTF-8 bytes, HTML entity and CSS/JS escapes.
- Click Remove invisible characters, Normalize spaces & quotes or Convert to plain ASCII, then copy the clean text.
Why invisible characters cause bugs
Text copied from Word, Google Docs, PDFs, Slack or AI chat tools often carries characters you can’t see: zero-width spaces (U+200B), no-break spaces (U+00A0), soft hyphens, byte-order marks (U+FEFF) or directional marks. They make a CMS slug different from the one you typed, break JSON and CSS, stop a search from matching and make two “identical” strings unequal.
| Character | Code | Typical source |
|---|---|---|
| Zero-width space | U+200B | Web pages, chat apps, AI output |
| No-break space | U+00A0 | Word, Google Docs, in HTML |
| Byte order mark | U+FEFF | Files saved as “UTF-8 with BOM” on Windows |
| Soft hyphen | U+00AD | Hyphenation tools, the Soft Hyphen Generator |
| Left-to-right / right-to-left mark | U+200E / U+200F | Mixed-language text, phone numbers |
Lookalike letters (homoglyphs)
Cyrillic “а” and Greek “ο” look exactly like Latin “a” and “o” but are different characters. They appear in copied text and in phishing domains. The inspector flags letters from another script when they’re mixed into Latin words.
Code points, UTF-8 and escapes
Every character has a code point (like U+1F680). On the web it’s stored as 1–4 UTF-8 bytes — which is why “é” counts as 2 bytes and 🚀 as 4 in byte limits. Use the HTML entity in markup, \1F680 in CSS content and \u{1F680} in JavaScript. For whole strings use the HTML Entity Encoder or URL Encoder; for emoji and symbols browse the Emoji Picker and Text Symbols.
Tools that pair well with the Unicode Character Inspector
- Smart Quotes to Straight Quotes — Code copied from Slack, Notion, Word or a blog won’t run?
- ASCII Art Generator — Type a word and see it in 20 ASCII art fonts at once — Standard, Slant, ANSI Shadow, Doom and more.
- Text Symbols & Special Characters — Check marks, arrows, stars, bullets, math and currency signs, superscripts, box drawing, invisible spaces and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ text faces — click to copy, with the HTML entity, CSS and Unicode for each.
- Emoji Copy & Paste — Find any emoji by what it means — “rocket”, “party”, “ok” — click to copy, collect several in a row, and get the HTML, CSS and JavaScript codes or a one-line emoji favicon.