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Whitespace Visualizer

Reveal tabs, non-breaking spaces and zero-width characters in your text.

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Removes zero-width characters and the BOM, converts odd spaces to ordinary ones, and strips trailing whitespace.

Quick Tool Overview

The Whitespace Visualizer makes visible the characters that survive every code review because there is nothing to see — a non-breaking space that breaks the parser, a zero-width space that makes two identical strings differ, a BOM that breaks your headers.

What it does
Reveals every invisible character in text
You give it
Any text or code
You get back
A marked-up version and a list of what is wrong
Best for
A syntax error on a line that looks fine
Developer Tools Free, unlimited use No sign-up Runs in your browser

About the Whitespace Visualizer

Every invisible character in your text, made visible: spaces as dots, tabs as arrows, and the thirty-odd others that take up space — or none — without showing anything at all.

These are the bugs that survive every code review, because there is nothing to see. A non-breaking space pasted from a document looks exactly like a space and breaks the parser. A zero-width space inside a string takes no width at all, so two strings that appear identical compare as different. A byte order mark at the start of a PHP file produces output before the headers and there is nothing in the editor to explain it. Each one found here is named, located by line and column, and explained — along with line endings, mixed indentation and trailing whitespace, with a one-click clean-up.

Key features of the Whitespace Visualizer

Thirty-three characters identified

Every space variant, every zero-width character, the direction marks and the separators that break JavaScript string literals.

Located and explained

Each one by line and column, with what it is and how it usually got there.

Line endings reported

CRLF, LF, CR or mixed — the last being what produces a diff where every line changed.

Mixed indentation flagged

A hard error in Python, and everywhere else a file that looks aligned only to whoever wrote it.

One-click clean-up

Zero-width characters removed, odd spaces converted, trailing whitespace stripped and the BOM taken off.

How to use the Whitespace Visualizer

  1. 1

    Paste your text

    Code, a config file, or anything that is behaving oddly.

  2. 2

    Read the marked-up version

    Every invisible character replaced by a visible symbol.

  3. 3

    Check what was found

    Each suspicious character named, located and explained.

  4. 4

    Clean it up

    Remove the zero-width characters, convert odd spaces and strip trailing whitespace in one step.

Frequently asked questions

A character that takes no width at all. It arrives by copying from a web page, a PDF or a chat client, and it makes two apparently identical strings compare as different — which is a genuinely hard bug to see.

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