Unicode Text Inspector

About this tool

Paste any text and the tool lists every character with its Unicode code point (U+1F600), general category, UTF-8 and UTF-16 bytes, and its HTML, JavaScript and CSS escapes. Totals show characters, visible characters (a family emoji is five code points but one visible character), UTF-8 bytes and UTF-16 units. It flags characters that cannot be seen or that change how text displays: zero-width spaces and joiners, the byte order mark, soft hyphens, no-break and other unusual spaces, bidirectional control characters that can make text appear in a different order, invisible tag characters, variation selectors, control characters, lone surrogates and the replacement character that marks damaged text. It also warns when one word mixes look-alike alphabets, such as a Cyrillic а inside a Latin word. One button removes invisible characters (optionally keeping the joiners that emoji need), and you can export the text as a JavaScript, JSON, Python, HTML, CSS or URL-encoded escape sequence, or as UTF-8 bytes. Category names come from your browser's Unicode data. Everything runs in your browser.

How to use it

1. Paste or type the text.
2. Read the totals and any yellow alerts about hidden or look-alike characters.
3. Scroll the table for the details of each character.
4. Press Remove invisible characters to clean the text, or pick an escape style to copy.

Common problems

The count differs from my editor

Editors count UTF-16 units, code points or visible characters. All three are shown, so you can see which one your tool uses.

Removing invisible characters broke an emoji

Leave keep emoji joiners ticked so the zero-width joiners and variation selectors that build emoji are kept.

A word looks normal but is flagged

It mixes letters from two alphabets, such as Latin and Cyrillic. They can look identical, so check the characters in the table.