Unicode Character Inspector
See each character's code point, name, bytes and escapes, and find invisible or look-alike characters.
How to use the Unicode Character Inspector
- 1Paste any text. Every character is listed with its code point, official name, category and bytes.
- 2Check the findings for invisible characters, look-alike letters from other scripts and bidirectional controls.
- 3Click a character to see all its escapes, compare normalization forms, and clean the text with one click.
About Unicode Character Inspector
The Unicode Character Inspector shows what text really contains. Paste any string and every character is listed with its code point, official Unicode name, category and UTF-8 bytes. Summary tiles count code points, graphemes, UTF-16 units, UTF-8 bytes, non-ASCII characters and invisible characters. You can also add a character by code point in notations like U+1F600, \u{1F600} or 😀.
The findings highlight zero-width spaces, other invisible characters, bidirectional control characters and look-alike letters from other scripts, using the Unicode confusables list. Click a character to see its UTF-8 and UTF-16 encodings and escapes for JavaScript, JSON, Python, CSS, HTML, URLs, C and Rust. A normalization view compares NFC, NFD, NFKC and NFKD, and one click cleans the text. The whole input can also be exported as escaped text.
The Unicode lookup helps developers debug strings that fail to compare or validate, find hidden characters copied from PDFs, chats or websites, check usernames and domains for homoglyph spoofing, and pick the right escape sequence for source code. Writers and translators can use it to find stray characters in a document.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my text have more characters than I can see?
What you see as one character can be several code points: an emoji with a skin tone joined by zero-width joiners, a letter with combining accents, or a flag made of two regional indicators. Invisible characters such as zero-width spaces add to the count without showing anything.
What are look-alike (confusable) characters?
Characters from different scripts that look the same, such as the Latin a and the Cyrillic a. They are used to fake domain names and user names, for example paypal.com written with a Cyrillic letter. The inspector marks them using the Unicode confusables list.
What is Unicode normalization?
The same text can be stored in different ways: e with an accent as one code point (NFC) or as e followed by a combining accent (NFD). The compatibility forms NFKC and NFKD also fold variants like the ligature fi or superscript 2 into plain letters and digits. Normalize before comparing or searching text.
What is the difference between graphemes, code points and UTF-16 units?
A grapheme is what a reader sees as one character. A code point is one entry in the Unicode table. JavaScript counts UTF-16 units, where characters beyond U+FFFF, such as most emoji, count twice. UTF-8 needs one to four bytes per code point.
More in Encode & Format
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