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Invisible Character Revealer

Reveal the characters you can't see in a text: zero-width spaces, non-breaking spaces, bidi marks, control characters and CRLF versus LF line endings. Inspect every occurrence and clean them out with a click.

Everything runs locally in your browser. Your data never leaves your device.

Input

Next steps

Send this tool's output straight into another tool.

Convert text into every case at once: title case in the APA, AP, Chicago, MLA, Bluebook, AMA and NYT styles, sentence case, upper, lower, camelCase, snake_case, kebab-case and more, each with its own copy button.

Count words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, lines and more as you type, with estimated reading and speaking time.

Remove duplicate lines from a list or text, keeping the first occurrence. Optionally ignore case and whitespace, or drop blank lines too.

Replace text in two modes: plain find and replace all, or regular expressions with flag controls and capture group references like $1.

Compare two texts and see every added, removed and changed line highlighted, side by side or inline, with the changed words marked within each line. Ignore case, whitespace or blank lines, read a summary of how much changed, and export the result as a unified diff.

Paste a UUID to see what it carries: version, variant, and for time-based versions the exact timestamp, clock sequence and node. Also shows the raw bytes, the 128-bit integer and the URN form.

Decode Base64 to text or encode text to Base64. Paste into the top box, read the result below, and flip the direction with one click. Handles Unicode correctly, reads URL-safe Base64, and shows binary payloads as a hex dump you can download.

Convert between scientific notation and full numbers as you type. Reads 1.23e5, 1.23 × 10^5 and plain numbers, shows the value written out, in normalized scientific notation and in engineering notation, and can round to any number of significant digits.

Sort the lines of a text alphabetically, naturally, by length, by numeric value or shuffled. Reverse the order with a switch, and optionally trim lines, drop blank lines and remove duplicates in the same pass.

Convert a color between HEX, RGB, HSL, HSV, HWB, CMYK, OKLCH and OKLAB. Type into any field and the others update as you go, or pick the color visually. Reads CSS color syntax and keeps alpha where the format supports it.

Check two colors against the WCAG contrast rules. Type or pick a text and a background color, read the contrast ratio, see which AA and AAA checks pass, preview real text at the sizes WCAG distinguishes, and get suggested fixes when a check fails.

Create a QR code for text, a link, an email, a phone number, an SMS, Wi-Fi access or a contact card. Set the error correction level, size, margin and colors, then download it as PNG or SVG or copy it straight to the clipboard.

Paste a cron expression and get a plain English explanation, a field by field breakdown and the next times it would run, in your local timezone or UTC. Reads five field crontab syntax, six fields with seconds, names like MON and macros like @daily.

Work out an IPv4 or IPv6 network from an address with a prefix or netmask: network and broadcast addresses, usable host range, subnet mask, wildcard mask and address type. Adjust the prefix with a slider, read the binary breakdown, and split the network into smaller subnets.

Hash text or a file with MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-512, SHA-3, BLAKE2, BLAKE3, CRC32 and more, all computed live as you type. Compare against an expected checksum and copy any digest.

Verify a checksum online: drop a file, paste the expected checksum and see instantly whether they match. The hash type is detected from the checksum itself, covering MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-512, BLAKE3, CRC-32 and more, and sha256sum lines or whole checksum files can be pasted as-is.

Encode text for use in URLs or decode percent-escaped strings back to readable text. Choose component, full-URL or form encoding, unwrap double-encoded strings, and break a URL into its parts with every query parameter decoded.

Convert Unix timestamps in seconds, milliseconds, microseconds or nanoseconds to readable dates in your local time, UTC or any timezone, and turn any date back into a timestamp. Shows the live current timestamp and relative time.

Escape text into HTML entities or decode entities back to plain text. Choose named or numeric entities, escape only the unsafe characters or everything outside ASCII, and read the result live.

Paste a JSON Web Token to see its header and payload as formatted JSON, with the token color coded so each part maps to its output. Explains the registered claims, shows expiry as readable dates, flags expired tokens and can verify the signature with a secret or public key.

Compress text or a file with gzip, deflate, brotli or Zstandard and see the size before and after, the compression ratio and how long it took. One click tries every method and recommends the smallest result.

Decompress gzip, deflate, brotli or Zstandard data from a file or pasted Base64 and read the result as text or download it. Detects the format from the magic bytes where possible, with a manual override.

Paste anything that looks encoded and this tool works out what was used and undoes it, layer by layer. The whole BaseXX family from Base16 to Base85, binary, URL escapes, HTML entities, ROT13 and gzip, Brotli or Zstandard compression are detected in any combination, and every step of the chain is reported.

Escape or unescape a string for JSON, JavaScript, regex, shell, SQL, CSV, XML and more. Paste text, pick the target format and copy the result, in either direction.

Paste a PEM certificate to see its subject, issuer, validity dates, subject alternative names, key details, fingerprints and extensions in plain view.

Paste a 2FA secret or an otpauth:// link and watch the one-time codes tick live, with a countdown to the next code. Supports the digit counts, periods and algorithms real authenticators use.

Format code in JavaScript, TypeScript, JSON, JSON5, HTML, Vue, CSS, SCSS, LESS, Markdown, YAML, GraphQL, XML and SQL. Pick tabs or spaces, set the indent width, and format the input in place with one click.

Reveal the characters you can't see in a text: zero-width spaces, non-breaking spaces, bidi marks, control characters and CRLF versus LF line endings. Inspect every occurrence and clean them out with a click.

Test a regular expression against your own text and see every match highlighted as you type, with capture groups color coded and broken down match by match. Toggle any JavaScript regex flag, read the exact error when a pattern is invalid, and copy all matches as a list.

About the Invisible Character Revealer

This tool shows you the characters in a text that you cannot see. Paste anything suspicious and every zero-width space, bidi mark, no-break space, control character and other hidden Unicode character is revealed as a small labelled chip, color-coded by kind, with its name, code point and exact line and column.

Hidden characters sneak in all the time. Copying from a web page or a PDF brings along no-break spaces and soft hyphens, some sites and AI text carry zero-width watermarks, and a stray bidi override can make code read backwards. A findings panel counts everything per kind, reports tabs and trailing whitespace, and tells you whether the line endings are LF, CRLF or a mix. The cleanup panel then removes or normalizes exactly what you choose.

What you can do

  • Find zero-width spaces and other hidden characters in a text.
  • Detect zero-width watermarks in AI-generated or copied text.
  • See non-breaking spaces and every other Unicode space variant.
  • Spot bidirectional control characters that reorder text.
  • Check whether a file uses LF or CRLF line endings, and convert between them.
  • Remove all invisible characters with one click.
  • Normalize special spaces to regular spaces.
  • Find tabs and trailing whitespace before a code review flags them.
  • Inspect any hidden character's name, code point and UTF-8 bytes.

How to use the Invisible Character Revealer

  1. 1Paste your text into the input box, or press Try an example.
  2. 2Read the findings: counts per kind, the line-ending style, tabs and trailing whitespace.
  3. 3Look at the revealed text. Every hidden character shows up as a colored chip, and clicking one shows its code point, UTF-8 bytes and position.
  4. 4Pick the cleanup fixes you want, or press Remove everything invisible.
  5. 5Copy or download the cleaned text, or send it on to another tool.

What it detects

The catalog covers the zero-width family (zero width space, zero width joiner and non-joiner, word joiner, the byte order mark, variation selectors, invisible math operators and Unicode tag characters), all twelve bidirectional controls from the marks to the isolates, the full space family from the no-break space to the ideographic space, the soft hyphen, Hangul fillers, the braille blank and every C0 and C1 control character. Tabs, trailing whitespace and the LF versus CRLF question are reported separately, since they are ordinary characters in the wrong place rather than hidden ones.

Zero-width characters are also what most text watermarks and homograph tricks are made of, so a text that looks clean but carries a pattern of ZWSP and ZWNJ chips is worth a closer look.

How the cleanup works

Each fix targets one kind of character. Zero-width characters, bidi controls and control characters are removed outright, special spaces become regular spaces, and the Unicode line and paragraph separators become normal line feeds so the text keeps its structure. Trailing whitespace and line-ending conversion are separate switches, so you can fix a mixed-endings file without touching anything else. The counters above the result confirm when nothing invisible is left.

If the text looks encoded rather than hidden, the Magic Decoder can work out what was applied to it, and Find and Replace handles substitutions the cleanup options do not cover.

Decode Base64 to text or encode text to Base64. Paste into the top box, read the result below, and flip the direction with one click. Handles Unicode correctly, reads URL-safe Base64, and shows binary payloads as a hex dump you can download.

Format code in JavaScript, TypeScript, JSON, JSON5, HTML, Vue, CSS, SCSS, LESS, Markdown, YAML, GraphQL, XML and SQL. Pick tabs or spaces, set the indent width, and format the input in place with one click.

Remove duplicate lines from a list or text, keeping the first occurrence. Optionally ignore case and whitespace, or drop blank lines too.

Replace text in two modes: plain find and replace all, or regular expressions with flag controls and capture group references like $1.

Escape text into HTML entities or decode entities back to plain text. Choose named or numeric entities, escape only the unsafe characters or everything outside ASCII, and read the result live.

Generate placeholder text: pick how many words, sentences or paragraphs you need, optionally starting with the classic Lorem ipsum opening, and copy the result.