Unicode Inspector

About

Unicode Inspector is a paste-and-inspect tool for developers, writers,
moderators, and anyone who needs to know EXACTLY what's inside a piece of
text — without pasting it into a random online tool that stores or analyzes
it server-side.

Paste your text in, and the popup instantly shows:
- A per-character breakdown: every character's Unicode code point (U+XXXX),
  name, and category — iterated correctly by Unicode code point, so emoji
  and other characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane show up as ONE
  correct character, not a broken pair.
- Every invisible, zero-width, control, or bidirectional-override character
  in your text, detected and highlighted with its code point, name, and
  position — including non-breaking and other look-alike blank spaces (the
  classic "why won't this string match" case), variation selectors, and the
  combining grapheme joiner. The kind of hidden character used in filename
  spoofing (paypal-login[invisible chars].exe), ban-evasion, or left behind
  by copy-pasting from rich-text sources.
- One-click strip: remove every detected invisible/control character and
  get clean text back. It's careful about what "clean" means — ordinary
  emoji are left untouched (the invisible joiners inside a multi-part emoji
  like a family or a flag are kept, keycap emoji like 1️⃣ and #️⃣ keep their
  glue too, and an explicit text-presentation choice like 😀︎ survives), and
  odd blank spaces such as a non-breaking space are turned into a normal
  space rather than deleted, so your spacing survives while the string
  finally matches.

PRIVATE BY DESIGN
This is a paste-mode tool: it never reads the active tab or any page
content, requests no host permissions, and injects no scripts. The text
you paste never leaves your browser. This extension collects no data of
any kind — no analytics, no tracking, no telemetry. The only network
traffic it ever makes is a purchase-verification check with
ExtensionPay if you choose to upgrade.

HONEST ABOUT SCOPE
Character names are drawn from a curated subset covering Basic Latin
letters and digits, common punctuation and symbols, the invisible/control
characters this tool exists to catch, and a handful of well-known emoji —
not the full 150,000+ entry Unicode Character Database. Anything outside
that subset is still shown accurately by its code point and real Unicode
category, just without a proper name attached — we never guess or
fabricate a name. Likewise, the premium homoglyph detector checks against
a curated set of the most common Cyrillic/Greek look-alikes of Latin
letters, not the full Unicode Consortium confusables table.

Similarly, the one-click strip's emoji-safe handling (keeping the joiners
and selectors that hold multi-part emoji and keycap sequences together) is a
scoped adjacency check, not full validation against the official emoji
sequence registry — in the rare case of a zero-width joiner deliberately
hidden between two unrelated emoji characters that don't form a real emoji,
that joiner may be kept rather than stripped. Every other invisible
character in your text is still detected and stripped as normal.

FREE, AND GENUINELY USEFUL
- Per-character Unicode code point, name (curated subset), and category
  breakdown.
- Invisible/zero-width/control/bidi-control character detection and
  highlight, covering zero-width space/joiner/non-joiner, word joiner,
  byte-order mark, soft hyphen, all nine bidi override/isolate control
  characters, the full range of C0/C1 control characters, variation
  selectors, the combining grapheme joiner, and non-ASCII blank spaces such
  as the non-breaking space (tabs and line breaks are deliberately left
  alone — they're normal structure, not hidden tricks).
- One-click strip of every detected invisible/control character — which
  keeps the invisible joiners and selectors that hold multi-part emoji and
  keycap sequences together, preserves an explicit text-presentation choice,
  and converts stray non-standard blank spaces to a normal space instead of
  deleting them.

PREMIUM ($5 one-time)
Built for anyone who needs to go a step further:
- Homoglyph / confusable detection: flags Cyrillic and Greek characters
  that visually resemble Latin letters — the trick behind IDN homograph
  attacks and typosquatting ("аpple.com" with a Cyrillic а instead of
  Latin a).
- Bulk normalize: convert text to Unicode Normalization Form NFC or NFKC
  with one click.
- Whitelist rules: tell the strip tool to keep specific characters even
  though they're flagged invisible.

No subscription, no account required — pay once, keep the features.