Invisible Character (Copy & Paste Blank Text)

What is an invisible character?

An invisible character is a real Unicode character that shows up as nothing: no letter, no mark, just empty space or no space at all. You can copy it, paste it and send it like any other text, which is why people use it for blank names, empty-looking messages and spacing that an app would otherwise remove. The same characters also hide inside ordinary text by accident, where they break searches, passwords and code. This page does both jobs: it copies blank text, and it finds and removes hidden characters.

How to copy an invisible character

1. Stay on Copy blank text and pick a character. The Hangul Filler (U+3164) is selected to start with, because it is the one that works in the most places.
2. Choose how many: tap 1, 3, 5, 10, 50 or 100, or type any number up to 2,000.
3. Choose In a row for one blank stretch, or One per line for a column of empty-looking lines.
4. Tap the big Copy button, then paste into a name field, a bio or a message. The box under the button shows each character you copied as a small label, since the real thing is, of course, invisible.

Blank text: copy and paste empty characters

“Blank text” is simply text made of invisible characters. It is useful whenever an app insists on something in a box but you want it to look empty:

• A blank message. Most chat apps refuse to send an empty message or one made only of spaces. A single Hangul Filler or Braille Pattern Blank usually goes through and arrives as an empty bubble.
• Long blank text. Set the count to 100 or more to push the next message out of view, or to leave a large gap in a post.
• Empty lines in a bio or caption. Many profile and post fields squeeze several blank lines into one. Put a blank character on each empty line (use One per line) and the lines usually stay.
• Indents and wide gaps. Normal spaces are collapsed into one in many places. An em space or ideographic space keeps its width, so it can indent the first line of a paragraph.

Which invisible character should I use?

It depends on where you paste it. The key difference is whether a character counts as a space. Apps trim spaces from the start and end of names and messages, so a name made only of spaces, even special ones, is often rejected. Blank letters such as the Hangul Filler and the Braille Pattern Blank are not spaces in Unicode, so they survive that trimming. Zero-width characters take up no room at all, so many apps treat a name made of them as empty.

These ratings describe what typically happens, not a promise for any one app. Every game, chat app and social site picks its own rules, and they change. If one character is rejected, go down the list and try the next.

Invisible characters for blank names and usernames

A blank name is a name that looks empty. Most sign-up forms and name fields don’t allow that on purpose, so whether it works depends on the platform. A few tips that help:

• Start with the Hangul Filler. It is the classic blank-name character because it is a letter that happens to have no shape.
• Try two or three. Some fields have a minimum length; three blank characters often pass where one does not.
• Mix in one visible character when a fully blank name is refused: a single dot or an apostrophe next to blanks still looks almost empty.
• Use it for a display name, not a login. Usernames you sign in with are usually limited to letters, numbers and a few symbols, and a blank one would be hard to type later anyway.

Please keep it fun. Don’t use blank names or messages to pretend to be someone else, to get around a ban, or to flood a chat. Moderators can see these characters, and most communities treat that as against their rules. If you just want a short, unusual name, the Username Generator and the Gamertag Generator have thousands of ideas.

How to send a blank text message

Copy one blank character, paste it into the message box and send. On a phone, long-press the message box and choose Paste. If the send button stays gray, the app has trimmed the character away: switch to the Braille Pattern Blank or paste two characters instead of one. A Zero Width Space on its own usually doesn’t work for this, because it has no width and many apps strip it.

Find and remove invisible characters

Hidden characters also turn up where nobody wanted them. Text copied from web pages, PDFs, spreadsheets and chat assistants can carry no-break spaces, zero-width spaces or a byte order mark. You can’t see them, but they make a search miss, a password fail, a spreadsheet formula break, or code stop working with a confusing error.

Open Find & remove and paste your text. Every hidden character appears as a small colored label in its exact position, and a table counts each kind with its name and code point. Then choose what to remove:

• Zero-width and formatting characters: zero width spaces, joiners, the byte order mark, soft hyphens and invisible tags.
• Blank letters: the Hangul fillers and the braille blank.
• Text direction marks: the marks and overrides that change whether text runs left to right or right to left.
• Control characters: leftovers such as the bell character or the object replacement character; line and paragraph separators become ordinary line breaks.
• Unusual spaces: turned into normal spaces (the default), removed, or kept.

Keep emoji intact is on by default. Some emoji are built from several characters glued together by a zero width joiner, and many get their color form from a variation selector. The checker marks those as part of an emoji and leaves them alone, so a family emoji doesn’t fall apart into three people.

Two cautions. In Persian and several Indian scripts the zero width non-joiner is part of correct spelling, and Arabic or Hebrew text may use direction marks on purpose; untick those boxes for such text. And a hidden character proves nothing about who wrote a text: no-break spaces come from word processors and websites all the time, and a clean result doesn’t prove a person wrote it either.

Hidden messages in tag characters

Unicode has a block of invisible “tag” characters, one for each letter, digit and punctuation mark. Their proper use is inside a few flag emoji. Strung together elsewhere, they can spell out a whole sentence that no reader sees, which is a known way to sneak instructions into text that a program will read. When the checker finds tag characters outside a flag, it decodes them and shows you the hidden message in plain letters.

Table of invisible characters and code points

These are all the hidden characters the checker recognizes, apart from the long ranges of variation selectors, tag characters and old control codes, which it reports too. The HTML code works in any web page.

The groups match the checkboxes in the remover: blank letters, zero-width and formatting characters, unusual spaces, text direction marks, control and separator characters.

How to type an invisible character on a keyboard

Copying is the easy way, but a few blanks can be typed directly:

• Windows: hold Alt and type 0160 on the number pad for a no-break space.
• Mac: Option + Space types a no-break space with the standard US keyboard layout.
• HTML: named codes include   (no-break space),   and   (en and em space),   (thin space), ‌ and ‍ (zero width non-joiner and joiner), ‎ and ‏ (direction marks) and ­ (soft hyphen). Any other character works with its number, such as ㅤ for the Hangul Filler.
• Code: most programming languages accept an escape such as ​ for the zero width space or ㅤ for the Hangul Filler.

A no-break space counts as a space, so it is trimmed in most name fields. For blank names, copy the Hangul Filler or the braille blank instead.

Why do invisible characters exist?

None of them were made for blank names. Each has a real job in writing systems and typesetting. The Hangul Filler and its relatives stand in for a missing part of a Korean syllable. The braille blank is the empty cell of the braille block, needed to write braille with spaces in it. Zero width joiners and non-joiners control how letters connect in scripts such as Arabic and the Indian scripts, and they also build compound emoji. Direction marks keep mixed English and Arabic or Hebrew text in the right order. The many spaces come from typesetting, where an em space, a thin space and a figure space each have a set width.

More text tools

Want to repeat a word or an emoji many times instead of a blank? Use the Text Repeater. For names that stand out rather than disappear, try the Fancy Text Generator. And to count the characters in a name or post, including hidden ones, paste it into the Word Counter.

Free and private

Everything happens in your browser. The text you paste into the checker is never uploaded or stored, so you can safely check code, documents and private messages.