Clean Text & Remove Special Characters

Removes zero-width characters, invisible Unicode, typographic special characters and NBSP from your text – optionally converts to plain ASCII. Everything runs locally in your browser, no text is sent to any server.

What is text cleaning needed for?

This tool removes invisible and problematic characters from text that can cause errors during data processing, in APIs, or during import/export operations:

  • Zero-width characters: Invisible Unicode characters (U+200B, U+FEFF, …) that break text comparisons
  • Typographic characters: Replaces "curly quotes", dashes – and other variants with ASCII equivalents
  • Unicode normalization: Optionally converts special characters (é, ñ, ä) to ASCII (e, n, a/ae)
  • Whitespace cleanup: Normalizes NBSP, thin spaces and other whitespace variants

Use cases: database imports, CSV/JSON processing, email text, API requests, code snippets, legacy systems (ASCII only). Background reading on the blog: Invisible Characters – The Hidden Risk in Digital Texts.

Input & markers

Preview with markers (problem spots in yellow):

Cleaned text

Removes zero-width characters, replaces typographic variants, normalizes NBSP→SPACE, optionally removes/transliterates diacritics and converts to plain ASCII.

Frequently asked questions

What are zero-width characters and why are they problematic?

Zero-width characters are invisible Unicode characters (e.g. U+200B, U+FEFF) that take up no visible space but can cause errors in databases, CSV files and APIs. The tool detects and removes them automatically.

How do I convert German umlauts to ASCII?

The tool offers three options: keep umlauts (ä, ö, ü), remove them, or transliterate to digraphs (ä→ae, ö→oe, ü→ue, ß→ss). Transliteration is ideal for systems that only support ASCII characters.

Is the tool free and privacy-friendly?

Yes, the tool is completely free. All text processing happens locally in your browser — no text is sent to any server. All fonts are hosted locally, no external trackers.

Which invisible characters are detected?

Detected and removed are, among others: Zero-Width Space (U+200B), Zero-Width Non-Joiner (U+200C), Zero-Width Joiner (U+200D), Byte Order Mark (U+FEFF), Soft Hyphen (U+00AD), Non-Breaking Space (U+00A0) as well as typographic quotes and dashes.