Remove Invisible Gaps & Hidden Characters in Text

An invisible gap is not a visible space. It is a pattern of invisible Unicode code points woven into otherwise normal writing: zero-width spaces (U+200B), word joiners, the byte-order mark, variation selectors, and a block of "tag" characters (U+E0000-U+E007F) hidden between ordinary letters. Because they have zero width, they survive copy-paste, slip into documents and form fields, and quietly break code, search, spacing, and database imports - even after you have rewritten the text. The same invisible junk sneaks in when you paste from PDFs, word processors, and web pages.

This cleaner removes that hidden layer without touching a single visible word. It deletes zero-width and formatting characters outright, normalises exotic spaces (non-breaking spaces, narrow spaces, ideographic spaces) back to a plain space, and converts stray line and paragraph separators to normal line breaks. The result reads exactly like what you see on screen, minus the invisible gaps. An optional toggle goes one step further and normalises punctuation - curly "smart" quotes, em-dashes, and the single-character ellipsis - turning them into their plain ASCII equivalents.

Everything runs locally with JavaScript in your browser. Your text is never sent anywhere, which matters when you are cleaning a confidential draft, a cover letter, client work, or anything you would not paste into a random website. Paste on the left, copy the cleaned version on the right, and you get an instant count of exactly how many hidden characters were found and removed - so you can see the invisible gaps that were there all along.