Invisible code points have legitimate uses, but they can also break exact matching, code, URLs and data imports.
Unicode supports far more than the visible letters and symbols on a keyboard. It also includes control, formatting and spacing characters that may occupy no visible width.
Common examples
- U+200B zero-width space: permits a break opportunity without showing a space.
- U+FEFF BOM: marks byte order in some contexts and may appear unexpectedly inside text.
- U+00AD soft hyphen: suggests where a word may be hyphenated.
- U+00A0 NBSP: displays as spacing but prevents a line break.
- Directional controls: influence display order in bidirectional text.
Remove with context
Deleting every non-ASCII character is destructive and wrong for multilingual text. A safer process is to identify exact code points, understand their purpose and remove only the set causing a problem.
Start with the Invisible Character Remover or inspect first with the Unicode tool.