Text copied from a PDF, a formatted document, or another website sometimes carries invisible or unusual characters — smart quotes, non-breaking spaces, stray control characters — that cause subtle bugs when pasted into code or a plain-text system.
This tool scans your text and flags every character outside the standard printable ASCII range, showing exactly which character it is, its Unicode code point, and where it appears in the text.
It's useful for debugging a mysterious parsing error caused by an invisible character, cleaning up text before pasting it into code, or verifying a file is genuinely plain ASCII before it goes somewhere that requires it.
Because everything runs locally in your browser, results appear instantly and nothing you type or upload is ever sent to a server.
Bookmark this page if you expect to use this tool regularly — it loads fast and behaves the same way every time, with no account needed.
This kind of task shows up constantly in everyday writing, coding, design, and admin work, which is exactly why a dedicated, focused tool saves so much back-and-forth.
A tool that does one job well, without a cluttered interface or unrelated features competing for attention, tends to be faster to use than a heavier all-in-one app.
If you find yourself needing this conversion or calculation often, keeping this page open in a tab is usually faster than digging through a bigger software suite's menus.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a "special" character here?
Anything outside the standard printable ASCII range (roughly space through tilde) — this includes smart quotes, em dashes, accented letters, emoji, and invisible characters like non-breaking spaces.
Why would invisible characters matter?
They can cause a program to reject input, break a string comparison, or introduce a subtle formatting bug that's otherwise very hard to spot just by looking at the text.