Find zero-width characters, BOM, non-breaking spaces (NBSP), and control characters hiding in text you can't see, get a table of counts by codepoint, and remove them all at once.
| Codepoint | Name | Count |
|---|
Characters like the zero-width space (U+200B), joiner marks (U+200C, U+200D), and a leading BOM (U+FEFF) render as nothing on screen but are still real characters in the string. When they sneak into code or config files, they can break string equality checks, throw off regex matches, or cause JSON/YAML parse errors.
This tool detects zero-width characters (U+200B-U+200D, word joiner U+2060), the BOM (U+FEFF), the non-breaking space NBSP (U+00A0), directional marks (U+200E, U+200F), the soft hyphen (U+00AD), and C0/C1 control characters other than tab and newline. Each is listed in a table with its codepoint (U+XXXX), name, and occurrence count.
They commonly show up in text copied from a word processor, files opened with the wrong encoding, and zero-width characters some messaging apps or sites insert for watermarking or tracking. Left in source code or config files, they can show up as puzzling diffs or break a build — scanning with this tool before pasting anywhere sensitive is a cheap safety check.