Invisible Unicode Characters Explained
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.