Strip zero-width spaces, soft hyphens and text-direction controls out of text — the characters you cannot see but that break search, sorting and formatting. Your file never leaves this page. Everything happens in your browser, and there is no upload endpoint to send it to — that is checked by a build gate that fails if any network code reaches a tool’s bundle.
How to do it
- Paste the text in. You are told what is hiding in it before anything changes.
- Choose what to remove. The defaults handle the characters that cause problems.
- Copy the cleaned text.
Questions
What are invisible characters and where do they come from?
They are real characters with no visible shape: zero-width spaces, soft hyphens, byte-order marks and direction controls. They arrive when you copy text out of a PDF, a chat client, a CMS or an AI assistant. On screen the text looks fine; to anything that searches, sorts or compares it, it is a different string.
Will this break my emoji?
No. Some invisible characters are load-bearing and are never removed. The zero-width joiner is what turns several people into one family emoji, and the zero-width non-joiner is required to spell words correctly in Persian, Hindi and Arabic. A cleaner that strips everything invisible corrupts text in those languages; this one does not.
What are text-direction controls?
Characters that change the order text is displayed in without changing what it says. They have a legitimate use in mixing right-to-left and left-to-right scripts, and a nasty one: they can make a line of code, a filename or a link read as one thing and mean another. If this page finds some in text you did not expect to contain them, that is worth knowing.
Is my text sent anywhere?
No. It never leaves the page. There is no upload and no server to receive it.