What are invisible characters?
Unicode contains dozens of characters that take up no visible space or look exactly like a normal space. They sneak in when you copy from web pages, PDFs, Word, Slack, AI chats and spreadsheets. You can’t see them, but software can, which is why they cause bugs that seem impossible:
- A password or coupon code that “doesn’t match” even though it looks identical
VLOOKUPand database lookups that fail on perfectly normal-looking values- Words that won’t wrap, search that can’t find a phrase, or a word count that’s off
- Code that throws
SyntaxError: Invalid characteron a line that looks fine
What ClepBoard finds
| Character | Code | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Zero-width space | U+200B | Web pages, CMS editors, chat apps |
| Zero-width joiner / non-joiner | U+200D / U+200C | Emoji, copy-paste from social apps |
| Byte order mark | U+FEFF | Files saved by Windows tools, CSV exports |
| Word joiner | U+2060 | Word processors, typesetting |
| Soft hyphen | U+00AD | PDFs, e-books, hyphenated web text |
| No-break space | U+00A0 | Word, Google Docs, HTML |
| Narrow no-break space | U+202F | AI chat output, French typography, macOS dates |
| Direction marks | U+200E, U+200F, U+202A–U+202E | Mixed-language text, spoofed file names |
ClepBoard is careful about the cases where these characters are needed: the zero-width joiner inside emoji like 👨👩👧 and the joiners used in Persian, Arabic and Indic scripts are left alone.
How to use it
- Paste your text into the box above (or press Ctrl/⌘ + V anywhere on the page).
- Open the X-ray tab to see each invisible character as a labelled chip. Hover a chip for its name and code point.
- Copy the cleaned version on the right. Only invisible characters are removed; every visible character stays exactly as it was.