Non-Printable Character Remover

Summary

This tool scans your text for control characters (U+0000–U+001F, U+007F, U+0080–U+009F) and other non-printable Unicode code points such as zero-width spaces, soft hyphens, word joiners, and invisible formatting marks. It removes them all and reports how many characters were stripped. Processing is entirely in your browser — nothing is sent to a server.

How it works

1. Paste or type text into the input area.
2. The tool scans every character using a Unicode-aware regex.
3. All control characters and non-printable code points are removed.
4. The cleaned text appears in the output area instantly.
5. A count shows exactly how many invisible characters were stripped.
6. Copy the cleaned text with one click.

Use cases

• Clean text copied from PDFs that contain hidden control bytes.
• Sanitize user input before storing it in a database.
• Remove zero-width spaces injected by chat apps or word processors.
• Fix garbled data caused by null bytes in CSV or JSON files.
• Prepare source code strings that fail linters due to invisible characters.
• Strip soft hyphens and word joiners from exported content.
• Detect and remove BOM (byte-order mark) characters from text.
• Pre-process text for NLP pipelines that choke on control codes.

Frequently Asked Questions