Zero-Width Space Remover

Invisible characters pasted out of an AI chat? Use the Claude watermark remover instead — it is tuned for that. This page is for everything else: a JSON payload that will not parse, an Excel column that will not match, a document you are about to submit, or just the list of what is hiding in there.

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Options Normalize exotic spaces (NBSP, thin, hair, figure) Typography pass (curly quotes, ellipsis, en dash → plain ASCII) Aggressive mode — also strip joiners, variation selectors, bidi marks

Aggressive mode can visibly change emoji, flags and right-to-left text. Off by default.

Cleaned text

Where they are

Every hidden character is marked in place, so you can see it in context before deleting anything.

Nothing scanned yet.

U+200B always invisible — removed in default mode U+200D invisible only in aggressive mode

What a zero-width space is

U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE is a real character that takes up no room. It exists so a browser knows where it may break a long word. It is invisible, it survives copy and paste, and it is the single most common reason a string that looks identical to another one fails to match it.

It is not the only one. The characters below are all invisible and all survive a copy:

U+200B zero width space
U+2060 word joiner
U+FEFF zero width no-break space, better known as a BOM
U+00AD soft hyphen
U+034F combining grapheme joiner
U+E0001 language tag and U+E0020–U+E007F tag characters
Private use characters: U+E000–U+F8FF, plane 15, plane 16

How to spot one

The symptoms are more recognizable than the character:

Two strings that render identically compare as unequal
A database lookup or a grep misses a line you can see
JSON or YAML fails to parse with a confusing error near an ordinary character
A backspace seems to do nothing once
Code copied from a page or a chat refuses to compile

Paste the text above and this page marks each one where it sits, then removes it.

What this keeps by default

Some invisible characters carry meaning, so they stay unless you turn on aggressive mode:

U+200D zero width joiner — holds emoji families together
U+200C zero width non-joiner — needed for Persian, Arabic and Devanagari
U+FE0F variation selector 16 — keeps emoji rendering as emoji
Regional indicator pairs (flags) and bidi marks in matched pairs

Is anything uploaded?

No. There is no backend behind this page. The scan and the cleanup both run in this browser tab, and the text never leaves your device.