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Unicode inspector

Paste any text to inspect it character by character and hunt down invisible or strange characters.

Unicode

What does it do?

It shows every character of a text one by one: its Unicode code point (U+00E9), its name or category, its UTF-8 bytes and how to escape it in JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is the tool for those moments when a string "looks right" but does not behave.

Typical problems it solves

  • A string comparison fails because one text has an invisible zero-width space.
  • A JSON file does not parse because it starts with a BOM.
  • A file named invoice\u202Etxt.exe hides its real extension with a right-to-left override.
  • é is one code point in one text and e plus a combining accent in another.

How to use it

  1. Paste the suspicious text.
  2. Check the counters: visible characters, code points, UTF-16 length and UTF-8 bytes.
  3. Invisible characters are highlighted in the table.
  4. Press Copy without invisible characters to get a clean version.

Frequently asked questions

›Why does "👍🏽".length return 4 in JavaScript?

length counts UTF-16 code units. The thumbs-up and the skin-tone modifier are two code points outside the basic plane, and each needs two units. Users see a single character (a grapheme).

›What are invisible characters and why do they matter?

Zero-width spaces, joiners, the BOM or bidirectional controls take no space on screen but break string comparisons, passwords, slugs and JSON parsing, and can be used to disguise file names.

›Which escape should I use?

\u00E9 or \u{1F600} in JavaScript strings, é in HTML and \E9 in CSS content. The table shows all of them for every character.