Find and delete zero-width spaces, BOMs and other hidden characters.
Detect and remove invisible characters that break searches, comparisons and CSV imports — zero-width spaces and joiners, byte-order marks, soft hyphens and directional marks. Counts exactly how many it found, and can normalise non-breaking spaces too.
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Zero-width spaces, non-breaking spaces, byte-order marks and directional marks — characters that occupy no visible space but are really there. They arrive from copying out of Word or PDFs, from web pages, and from exports written by software that added a BOM you never asked for.
Baffling ones, because you cannot see the cause. Two strings that look identical fail to match, a search finds nothing, a CSV import rejects a header row, or a lookup key silently misses. A leading byte-order mark breaking the first column of a CSV is a particularly common example.
Usually you do not until something breaks. The classic signs are an exact-match comparison failing on values that look the same, or a character count higher than the visible text justifies. Running suspect text through here is the quickest way to confirm or rule it out.
Yes, Remove Invisible Characters is completely free. No signup, no account, and no watermark on outputs. A Pro tier is available for 100 AI ops/day and larger file sizes.
Remove Invisible Characters runs entirely in your browser. Your file is never uploaded — it is read, processed and saved locally, so it never reaches our servers or anyone else's. You can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and it still works.
Why text breaks for no visible reason: Zero-width spaces, joiners, byte-order marks, soft hyphens and directional marks take up no space on screen but are absolutely present in the string. They make searches fail, comparisons return false, CSV columns split wrongly and identifiers refuse to match — while looking perfectly normal.
Where they come from: Copying out of PDFs and web pages, rich-text editors, translation tools, chat apps, and AI-generated text — some of which embeds zero-width characters deliberately. They also survive most copy-paste, so they spread quietly.
What gets removed: Zero-width space, non-joiner and joiner, word joiner, byte-order mark, soft hyphen, and left-to-right/right-to-left directional marks. Optionally, non-breaking and other unusual Unicode spaces become ordinary spaces.
Privacy: Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded, so it is safe for credentials, keys and confidential text.