Invisibles: hidden character cleaner

Find and strip hidden characters locally. Uses only Chrome's side-panel UI permission and has no host access.

Paste your text. See what is actually in it. Invisible characters get into text constantly: copied off a web page, pulled out of a PDF, pasted from a chat app, generated by an AI tool. Zero-width spaces, non-breaking spaces, soft hyphens, byte-order marks, directional marks. You cannot see any of them. Your code, your spreadsheet, your CMS and your search box all can. Invisibles shows you every one, tells you what it found, and strips them in a click. WHAT IT FINDS - Zero-width space, zero-width joiner, zero-width non-joiner - Non-breaking space and the other look-alike spaces that are not a normal space - Soft hyphens - Byte-order marks - Left-to-right and right-to-left directional marks - Other invisible formatting characters WHEN YOU NEED IT - Two strings look identical and the comparison still fails - An API key or password gets rejected and you cannot see why - One row of a CSV import breaks and the rest are fine - Search will not find a word that is plainly on the page - Text out of a PDF misbehaves the moment you paste it - You want to check whether something was written by an AI tool that leaves zero-width marks behind HOW IT WORKS Paste into the popup. It counts what it found and labels each kind, so you know whether you are looking at three zero-width spaces or one stray BOM. Press Clean it and you get the text back without them. Look-alike spaces are turned into ordinary spaces rather than deleted, so your text keeps its word breaks instead of running together. There is an optional switch to also normalise curly quotes and dashes to plain ASCII. PRIVACY This extension requests no permissions at all. Look at the permissions list on this page: it is empty. It cannot read the pages you visit, because it was never granted the ability to. There is no server, no analytics, no storage, no network code of any kind. Your text is handled inside the popup and is gone when you close it. The full source is on GitHub if you would rather confirm that than take my word for it. Free, open source, MIT licensed.