Remove zero-width characters, invisible control chars, BOM, soft hyphens, and hidden Unicode from any text. 100% browser-based.
This tool runs 100% in your browser. All computation happens locally on your device — your input is never uploaded to any server. Results are for reference only.
Invisible characters are real Unicode code points that render with zero width — they occupy a position in the string but show no glyph. PDF copy-paste, web scraping, and AI output routinely smuggle in zero-width spaces (U+200B), byte order marks (U+FEFF), soft hyphens (U+00AD), control characters (U+0000–U+001F), and bidi overrides (U+202E). The cleaner scans every code point against a table of known ranges and strips each match in a single left-to-right pass.
Each highlighted diamond is a hidden code point the scanner matches and removes — the visible letters never change.
Priya is a QA engineer who just pulled a 2,400-character test case out of a PDF spec. The formatter silently rejects it, so she runs it through this cleaner to find out why.
Remove zero-width spaces, BOM, soft hyphens, control characters, and hidden Unicode from any text. Everything runs locally; nothing is uploaded.
FreeToolHub Text Cleaner is a free browser-based tool — remove zero-width spaces, BOM, soft hyphens, control characters, and hidden Unicode from any text. No signup, no upload; everything runs locally in your browser.
Remove zero-width spaces, BOM, soft hyphens, control characters, and hidden Unicode from any text. Fix copy-paste glitches. Free, no signup.
The Text Deep Cleaner is a free, browser-based tool that finds and removes invisible Unicode characters that plague text copied from PDFs, websites, AI chatbots, and word processors. It targets 11 specific character categories: zero-width spaces (U+200B/C/D), BOM/zero-width no-break space (U+FEFF), soft hyphens (U+00AD), control characters (U+0000-001F), format characters (line/paragraph separators, bidi override), and special block characters. Unlike simple find-and-replace, this tool scans every byte and shows exactly what was removed.
Writers and translators who paste text from PDFs and get broken formatting. Programmers whose code breaks because of hidden characters in copied strings. SEO professionals cleaning scraped content. Students copying citations from academic papers. Anyone whose text has mysterious gaps, broken links, or unexplained formatting issues after copy-pasting from another source.
Paste your text into the input field. The tool instantly shows how many invisible characters it detects. Toggle individual cleaning options to customize what gets removed. Click Clean Text to process. The cleaned output appears on the right with a detailed breakdown of what was removed per category. Copy the result or download as a file. All processing happens locally — your text never leaves your browser.
Zero-width characters are Unicode characters that take up no visible space but exist in the text. They include zero-width space (U+200B), zero-width non-joiner (U+200C), and zero-width joiner (U+200D). They are often inserted by word processors, websites, and AI tools, and can break code, links, and formatting when the text is copied elsewhere.
Invisible characters like BOM, soft hyphens, and zero-width spaces are not visible in most editors but can cause issues when pasted into code editors, databases, or form fields. This tool detects and removes them so your text works everywhere.
It targets the usual suspects that break layouts and search: zero-width spaces, zero-width joiners, byte-order marks (BOM), soft hyphens, control characters, and bidirectional overrides — plus normalization of tabs, CRLF line endings, and repeated blank lines. Each cleaning step is a toggle, so the report shows exactly what was found and what was removed.
Copying from word processors, web pages, and PDFs drags formatting along: Word inserts soft hyphens at line breaks, web CMSes add zero-width spaces, and some sites embed BOMs that corrupt string comparisons. They are invisible in every editor but cause subtle failures — CSS not matching, duplicate detection missing, and search indexes missing terms. The cleaner surfaces them so you can see what was hiding.
Yes — every step is a switch, defaulting to the safe set (invisible-character removal and whitespace normalization). You can enable aggressive options like stripping all line breaks or punctuation as needed, and the input is never modified: the result panel shows the cleaned output alongside a per-step breakdown of what changed.
No. All processing is local string manipulation in your browser — nothing leaves your device and nothing is stored server-side. Your input/output presets can be saved as local snapshots (IndexedDB) to reuse the same cleaning configuration on future documents.
This tool is also known by these tasks — each link opens the same tool with a focused guide:
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No signups, no data sold. Every tool is free to use — the free tier allows 5 downloads or saves per day, and the optional Pro plan ($7/mo, $59/yr) adds unlimited downloads, batch processing, white-label exports and an ad-free experience.
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