Remove hidden characters

Some characters take up no space and show nothing on screen, yet break string comparisons, CSV imports and search. Paste your text to see how many are there and where, then remove them. Emoji are left alone: the joiners inside them look like hidden characters but are what hold the emoji together.

This tool runs entirely on your device. Nothing you type here is uploaded, logged or stored.

Settings

DashesEm and en dashes become a plain hyphen.Smart quotesCurly quotes become straight ones.EllipsisThe single-character ellipsis becomes three periods.Invisible charactersNon-breaking spaces become ordinary spaces; zero-width and control characters are removed. Joiners inside emoji are kept, because removing them would break the emoji.

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Result

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These characters come from all sorts of places — AI assistants, Word, Google Docs, phone keyboards and copy-paste between apps all insert them. Their presence does not show that text was written by AI, and their absence does not show that it was not. This tool tells you what is in your text and lets you clean it; what that means is your call.

This tool runs entirely in your browser, so the controls above need JavaScript to do anything. The description stays readable either way — nothing here was ever going to be processed on a server.