Unicode and Invisible Character Inspector
Find invisible characters, look-alike letters and smart punctuation hiding in a piece of text.
About this tool
Scans text for the characters that are not what they look like, and shows exactly where each one is.
**Invisible characters.** Zero-width spaces, soft hyphens and non-breaking spaces arrive from word processors and CMS editors and are impossible to see. They are the usual answer to "why does this string not match itself", why a slug comes out wrong, and why a search finds nothing.
**Look-alike letters.** A Cyrillic а renders identically to a Latin a. This is how domains get impersonated, and it is worth checking any URL or brand name that arrived from outside.
**Smart punctuation.** Curly quotes and em dashes are correct in prose and wrong in code, URLs and configuration, where they silently break things.
Every finding is reported with its position, its code point and its official Unicode name, so there is no guessing about what was found.
Common questions
Why does my text contain invisible characters?
Almost always because it passed through a word processor, a PDF, or a rich text editor. Those insert soft hyphens, non-breaking spaces and zero-width characters as formatting, and pasting carries them along.
Are invisible characters an SEO problem?
They can be. A zero-width space inside a keyword means the page does not contain the word you think it does, and a non-breaking space in a URL slug produces an encoded character that does not match your redirects.
What is a homoglyph attack?
Registering a domain that uses a look-alike letter from another script, so it renders identically to a real one. Browsers show the punycode form for mixed-script domains as a defence, but text in an email or a document has no such protection.
Should I replace curly quotes?
In prose they are correct and typographically better. In code, URLs, configuration files and command lines they are wrong and break things, usually with an error that does not mention them.