Hidden Character Remover: Invisible Text Cleaner

Remove invisible characters from copied text: zero-width spaces, soft hyphens, smart quotes, HTML tags. See the receipt. Offline.

Hidden Character Remover is a small, offline tool for text that looks fine and is not. Paste a paragraph out of a PDF, a chat window, a slide deck or a website into your CMS, your email client or your terminal, and it can arrive carrying characters you cannot see: zero-width spaces that stop a search from finding a word, soft hyphens that split one, a byte-order mark at the very front, bidirectional controls that reorder a line, non-breaking spaces that glue two words together, and curly quotes where the system expects ASCII. This extension finds them, removes them, and then shows you exactly what it found. WHAT IT LOOKS FOR • Zero-width characters — U+200B, U+200C, U+200D, U+2060, U+180E • Soft hyphens — U+00AD • Byte-order marks — U+FEFF • Non-breaking and narrow spaces — U+00A0, U+2007, U+202F, turned into an ordinary space so the words do not run together • Bidirectional controls — U+200E, U+200F, U+202A through U+202E, U+2066 through U+2069 • Smart quotes, apostrophes and dashes — straightened back to plain ASCII • HTML tags — optional, off by default A RECEIPT INSTEAD OF A SILENT REWRITE Plenty of tools tidy text without telling you what changed, which is the wrong answer when you are pasting a legal quotation, a code sample or a byline. Every run reports a count for each kind of character it found, largest first, so you can see that one soft hyphen and eleven zero-width spaces came out before you copy the result. When nothing is found, it says so plainly instead of pretending it did something. THREE WAYS TO CLEAN TEXT • Paste into the popup. It inspects the text as you type and updates the receipt live. • Select text on a page and right-click → "Remove hidden characters". • Select text and press Alt+Shift+H. From a page, the cleaned text arrives in the popup with the receipt already filled in and the count on the extension badge — one click from your clipboard. It does not edit the page you are reading. Silently rewriting a live page is how text tools corrupt sites and editors, so this one hands you clean text and lets you decide where it goes. OPTIONS THAT STAY PUT "Keep smart quotes and dashes" leaves your typography alone while still removing the invisible characters, and the receipt marks those counts as kept rather than pretending they were absent. "Also strip HTML tags" gives you bare text when the paste arrived with markup. Both options are remembered between sessions, including across browser restarts, and both apply to the right-click and keyboard actions too. WHERE IT FITS Publishing a document into a CMS. Cleaning a quotation for a paper. Pasting a value into a terminal or a config file. Sending a description to a marketplace that rejects non-ASCII. Preparing text for search, where one invisible character can stop a match. Copying a product code, an address or an amount where a non-breaking space silently breaks the value. Tidying up snippets that arrived from a chat window. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO It does not read your clipboard: the copy button only writes to it, and the paste box is yours to paste into. It does not touch a page until you ask, never runs in the background, and never inspects a page you have not explicitly invoked it on. There is no account, no sign-in, no analytics and no model of any kind — every check is a fixed table of character codes inside the extension. PRIVACY IN ONE LINE The text you paste or select is processed locally on your device and is never sent anywhere. The extension makes no network requests at all. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Google. Chrome is a trademark of Google LLC.