Invisible characters

Micro-Formatter 1.0.1 and later · Last updated 8 November 2026

The words look normal, but search finds nothing, spacing jumps, or an editor shows a stray marker where you see nothing at all. One or two zero-width characters are sitting inside the text.

What you are seeing

A search for a word you can see returns nothing.
A red dot or a control-character box appears in a rich-text editor.
A PDF export drops the beginning of a line, or a URL stops working after a copy and paste.
A diff shows two identical lines as different.

Why it happens

Word processors and some web editors insert a zero-width space anywhere they may need to break a long word, and a byte-order mark at the start of a file. They are real characters, they are invisible, and they survive most clipboard round trips. The ones that cause this specific confusion are:

U+200B zero-width space
U+200C and U+200D zero-width non-joiner and joiner
U+FEFF byte-order mark

Fix it with the extension

Open Micro-Formatter, paste the text, and press Strip formatting.
Press Copy to Clipboard before pasting anywhere that cares.

Strip removes exactly those four code points, then tidies the whitespace around them.

What it will not do

It does not remove a non-breaking space (U+00A0) or a soft hyphen (U+00AD). Those are visible in some editors, and removing them silently would change justified text you may want to keep. If one of them is your problem, search for it in a code editor that can show code points and delete it there.

It also cannot fix a file that was already damaged by the wrong encoding — that is the curly quotes case, not this one.