UtilityKit

40+ fast, free tools. Most run in your browser only; Image & PDF tools upload files to the backend when you run them.

Hidden Character Detector

Detect invisible characters like NBSP, zero-width spaces, BOM, tabs, CR/LF, and control chars, then clean safely.

About Hidden Character Detector

Hidden Character Detector helps you find invisible characters that often break validation, parsing, and formatting. It scans for tabs, non-breaking spaces, zero-width code points, BOM, line-ending bytes, and control characters, then reports counts and sample positions so you can debug quickly. You can selectively remove classes of hidden characters and copy a cleaned result without rewriting the rest of your text.

Why use Hidden Character Detector

  • Fix copy-paste issues from rich editors and PDFs.
  • Diagnose parser failures caused by invisible characters.
  • Clean text selectively without losing meaningful content.

How to use Hidden Character Detector

  1. Paste input text into the detector.
  2. Run detection to review counts and positions.
  3. Select character classes to remove and copy cleaned text.

When to use Hidden Character Detector

  • Text looks correct but fails strict equality checks.
  • Data imports break after copy-pasting from documents.
  • You need to normalize whitespace and hidden Unicode safely.

Tips

  • Run detect before and after cleanup to verify changes.
  • Keep LF unchecked when preserving paragraph structure.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which hidden characters are detected?

Tabs, NBSP, zero-width space/joiners, BOM, CR, LF, and ASCII control characters.

Does the tool show where characters occur?

Yes, it reports sample absolute positions with line and column hints.

Can I remove only one character class?

Yes, cleanup is class-based so you can target only what you need.

Should I remove LF line breaks by default?

Usually no. Keep LF unless you explicitly want single-line output.

Is my text uploaded?

No, detection and cleanup run in-browser.

Related tools

Glossary

NBSP
A non-breaking space (U+00A0) that prevents automatic line wrapping.
BOM
A byte order mark (U+FEFF) that can appear unexpectedly and break tooling.