Remove Invisible Characters from Word and Google Docs
For a spreadsheet column use the Excel cell cleaner. For code and payloads use the JSON cleaner. To find the difference between two strings, use compare texts.
Why the counts are on the page
When you clean a document you are about to submit, the worry is not whether it removed something — it is whether it removed something you wanted. So this page reports the word count and the character count before and after.
Removing invisible characters should never change the word count, because none of them are word characters. If the word count moves, something is wrong and you should not use the result. That is the whole point of showing it.
Paste without formatting does not help
The first thing everyone tries is Paste without formatting
(Ctrl+Shift+V) or Clear formatting. Neither
one touches these characters. Those commands strip styling — fonts, sizes, colours,
hyperlinks. A zero width space is not styling, it is a character, so it survives every
formatting command there is.
What Word and Docs show you
Both Word’s Show/Hide ¶ and Google Docs’ Show non-printing characters reveal paragraph marks, spaces and tabs. Neither reliably marks every Unicode invisible character, so do not treat a clean-looking ¶ view as proof that the text is clean. It is not proof of anything.
Removing them inside Word or Docs
Open Find and Replace (Ctrl+H), paste the actual character into
Find what, leave Replace with empty, and choose Replace All. The
Find box will look empty because the character is invisible; it is not empty. You can copy
the character from the character list.
Repeat for each character you care about — usually U+200B,
U+2060, U+00AD and U+FEFF. That is tedious, which is
why the box above exists: select the text, copy it, clean it in one pass, paste it back.
Where they come from in a document
Text pasted out of a web page, a PDF, an email, a translation tool or a chat window. Word and Docs keep what you paste, invisible characters included, and then carry them into whatever comes next: a mail merge, a find, a spell check, an export, or a paste into another system that then reports the two strings do not match.
Is anything uploaded?
No. There is no backend. The cleaning runs in this browser tab, so a confidential document never leaves your device.