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Paste any text and get a full breakdown of every character it contains, including its Unicode codepoint — useful for spotting hidden invisible characters, confirming an emoji's exact codepoint, or debugging mysterious-looking text that behaves oddly in code or in a form field. Text that looks completely normal to the eye can secretly contain zero-width spaces, non-breaking spaces, homoglyphs (lookalike characters from a different script), or other invisible formatting marks, and none of that is visible just by reading the text on screen. This is exactly the kind of problem that causes maddening bugs: two strings that look identical fail a strict equality check in code, a username that appears to be a duplicate is somehow accepted by a system that should have blocked it, or copy-pasted text from a document behaves unexpectedly when processed. A character-level breakdown is the fastest way to see what's actually there, byte by visible character, rather than what it merely looks like.
How it works
The text is split into individual Unicode characters using multi-byte-safe splitting, so multi-byte characters like emoji, accented letters, or CJK characters are treated as one character each rather than being broken into fragments. Each character is then listed alongside its Unicode codepoint in standard "U+XXXX" hexadecimal format, giving you a complete, ordered inventory of exactly what characters make up the pasted text — visible or not.
- Enter text.
- Click Calculate to see your results.
Examples
Spotting a hidden character
Pasting text that looks empty or has an unexpected gap but actually contains a zero-width space reveals the invisible U+200B codepoint in the breakdown, explaining otherwise-confusing behavior like a string comparison silently failing.
Confirming an emoji's exact codepoint
Pasting a single emoji like 🎉 reveals its precise Unicode codepoint (U+1F389), useful when you need the exact reference for documentation or code that needs to match that specific character.
Detecting a lookalike character in a username
Pasting a username that looks like it uses a normal Latin "a" but actually uses a Cyrillic lookalike character reveals the mismatch immediately, since the two characters have different Unicode codepoints despite looking nearly identical.
Who should use it
- Debugging why two visually-identical strings don't match in code.
- Detecting an invisible character embedded in pasted text.
- Spotting a homoglyph/lookalike-character security concern.
Industry applications
- Software development/debugging
- Content moderation
- Security research
Advantages
- Reveals invisible and lookalike characters.
- Works with any Unicode text, including emoji and multi-byte scripts.
- Useful for both debugging and security purposes.
Limitations
- Long text produces a long, detailed breakdown that can be tedious to scan manually.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Assuming text that "looks" identical to another string is byte-for-byte identical — invisible or lookalike characters can differ even when the text appears the same on screen.
- Not checking for a stray non-breaking space or zero-width character when a string comparison mysteriously fails in code.
- Overlooking that a codepoint sequence can represent a single emoji made of multiple combined codepoints, not always a single simple character.
Best practices
- Use this when debugging unexpected string comparison failures, mysterious extra whitespace, or copy-pasted text behaving oddly.
- Check both ends of a suspected mismatch (the expected value and the actual value) side by side, character by character.
- Watch specifically for zero-width and non-breaking space codepoints, since they're the most common invisible-character culprits.
Tips
- Pair with the Zero Width Space Inserter to understand what that tool's output actually contains, character by character.
- For very long text, paste it in smaller chunks to make the breakdown easier to scan.