Hidden characters are invisible to the eye but cause real problems in code, databases, and editors. Zero-width spaces (U+200B) break word counts and search. Non-breaking spaces ( ) prevent text wrapping. Byte-order marks (U+FEFF) corrupt file headers. Soft hyphens (U+00AD) appear or disappear unpredictably. PasteLint finds and removes all of them — paste your text below and click Clean Text.
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What Are Hidden Characters and Why Do They Matter?
Hidden characters are Unicode code points that have no visible glyph — they take up space in your text string but are completely invisible in most editors and viewers. They enter your text when you copy from websites, PDFs, Word documents, AI chatbots, and messaging platforms. Common examples include:
- Zero-width space (U+200B) — breaks word counts, URL parsing, and search indexing
- Non-breaking space (U+00A0) — prevents text wrapping, often misidentified as a regular space
- Byte-order mark (U+FEFF) — corrupts file parsing when it appears mid-string
- Soft hyphen (U+00AD) — appears or disappears depending on rendering context
- Zero-width non-joiner/joiner (U+200C/D) — affects ligature rendering and can break scripts
- Directional marks (U+200E/F) — cause right-to-left text rendering in unexpected places
Where Hidden Characters Come From
They are inserted automatically by word processors, PDF renderers, CMS platforms, email clients, and web scrapers. Any time text crosses a system boundary — copy-paste from a browser, export from a document editor, output from an AI — hidden characters may be introduced. PasteLint strips all of them in one click, entirely in your browser.