Hidden & Invisible Character Detector
Find the invisible characters hiding in your text
Your text is processed locally by this tool — it isn't sent to Wibble. Free, no account.
Everything runs locally in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
Results update as you type.
Paste some text above — or load the example — to see which hidden characters it contains.
How it works
Paste or type text and the detector scans it code point by code point, grouping anything unusual into categories: zero-width characters and joiners, non-standard spaces, homoglyphs (Cyrillic or Greek letters that look Latin), bidirectional and control overrides, and — informational only — smart quotes and dashes. It shows each character's Unicode name, code point, and where it occurs. Cleaning is off by default; you opt into exactly which categories to strip or normalize.
Example
The invisible character some 'humanizers' inject
A zero-width space (U+200B) placed between letters is invisible on screen but splits a word for anything reading the raw text — which is how some detector-bypass tools try to fool plagiarism and AI checkers, and why plagiarism and AI-detection tools increasingly flag these characters as manipulation. The detector lists each one with its position, and you can then choose to remove it.
Limitations
- Homoglyphs are frequently legitimate: Greek, Cyrillic, and other scripts are ordinary writing for billions of people. Their presence is only suspicious if the text is meant to be Latin-only, and the tool says as much rather than declaring guilt.
- It flags characters, not intent. A no-break space or curly quote is normal typography; finding one doesn't mean the text was manipulated.
- The homoglyph list covers the common Cyrillic and Greek look-alikes, not every possible confusable across all of Unicode, so an exotic look-alike can slip through.
- Cleaning is destructive — mapping homoglyphs rewrites real non-Latin text (Greek 'ΟΡΑ' becomes 'OPA'), which is why every transform is opt-in and off by default.
- Smart quotes and dashes are reported for awareness only and are never counted toward the suspicious total.
Frequently asked questions
Is my text uploaded when I scan it?
No. The scan and any cleaning run entirely in your browser; your text isn't sent to Wibble, stored, or logged. That's deliberate — the whole point is to inspect text you may not trust, so it never leaves your machine. You can disconnect after loading and it still works.
Does finding hidden characters mean my text was manipulated?
Not on its own. Zero-width characters and homoglyphs can be injected to fool detectors, but many also appear naturally — copied PDFs add odd spaces, and non-Latin letters are ordinary writing. The tool reports what's there and lets you judge; it doesn't declare guilt.
Will cleaning break my emoji or formatting?
Cleaning is opt-in per category and conservative. Zero-width joiners (ZWJ) and non-joiners (ZWNJ) are always preserved — they hold emoji sequences like 👩💻 together and carry meaning in Persian, Arabic, and Indic scripts — so a ZWJ is never removed even if it looks stray. Only the truly-invisible fillers with no linguistic role are removed: the zero-width space, the word joiner, and the byte-order mark. Homoglyph mapping stays off by default because it rewrites legitimate non-Latin text.
Why do some tools add these characters?
Some 'AI humanizer' or detector-bypass tools insert invisible characters — zero-width spaces, look-alike letters — to disrupt the patterns detectors and plagiarism checkers key on. It's fragile: many checkers now strip or flag these, so it can make text look more manipulated, not less. Wibble rewrites structure instead.
What counts as a 'non-standard space'?
Any space that isn't a plain ASCII space or normal line break — no-break spaces, narrow and thin spaces, the ideographic space, and the soft hyphen. They're often harmless artifacts of copying from PDFs or word processors, but they can throw off search, diffing, and some checkers.
Wibble humanizes by rewriting structure, not hiding characters — try it free.
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