Invisible character remover
Paste any text to find hidden characters: zero-width spaces, look-alike letters from other alphabets, direction controls and other invisible Unicode. Then copy a clean version. It runs entirely in your browser.
What the remover finds
- Zero-width characters such as U+200B (zero-width space), U+200C/U+200D (joiners) and U+2060 (word joiner). Joiners inside emoji are left alone, because they hold the emoji together.
- Look-alike letters from Cyrillic or Greek mixed into English words, like "pаypal" with a Cyrillic "а".
- Direction controls that can reorder how text appears on screen.
- Variation selectors and tag characters. Long runs of these can carry hidden data, such as an embedded provenance record.
The cleaned copy also normalises compatibility characters (for example full-width letters and ligatures) to their plain forms.
Why hidden characters matter
Hidden characters break search, word counts and spell checkers, and they can trip up plagiarism and AI checkers. Some people insert them on purpose to get text past a filter. Others never notice them, because a PDF or a website added them during copying. Either way, cleaning them gives every tool, including our AI detector, the same plain text a reader sees.
Hidden characters are not proof of AI
A rumour says chatbots hide invisible watermarks in their answers. Mainstream chat apps don't, and the old version of this site wrongly treated hidden characters as a sign of AI. Our detector now reports them separately, as information about where a text has been, and never uses them in the verdict.
Questions
What are invisible characters?
Unicode characters that take up no visible space, such as the zero-width space (U+200B), the zero-width joiner, text-direction controls and variation selectors. They often arrive when text is copied from PDFs, web pages, chat apps or word processors.
Do invisible characters mean a text was written by AI?
No. Mainstream chatbots don't add them as watermarks, and plenty of human documents contain them after copying and pasting. They tell you something about how the text travelled, not who wrote it.
What are look-alike letters?
Letters from other alphabets that look identical to Latin ones, such as a Cyrillic 'а' inside an English word. They are sometimes used to dodge filters or plagiarism checks. The remover swaps them back only inside words that are otherwise in the Latin alphabet, so genuine Greek or Cyrillic text is left alone.
Is my text uploaded?
No. The cleaning happens in this page, on your device. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Is this AI written? Check it now.
Free, no sign-up, no word limit. The check runs in your browser, so your text never leaves your device.
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