Zero-Width & Invisible Characters

Not all Unicode characters have visible glyphs. This page catalogs the characters that affect text rendering, layout, and direction without rendering any visible mark themselves. They are the most common source of subtle bugs: string comparisons that fail, lengths that don't match, copy-paste that silently inserts hidden characters, and bidirectional text that renders incorrectly.

Each entry below links to the character's full detail page where you can see its UTF-8 bytes, HTML entity, JavaScript escape, and other encoding formats — useful for detecting and removing these characters from user input.

U+200B

Zero Width Space

Used to allow line breaks without a visible hyphen. Invisible in rendered text.

U+200C

Zero Width Non-joiner

Prevents two characters from forming a ligature. Critical in Arabic and Devanagari.

U+200D

Zero Width Joiner

Joins emoji into sequences (👨‍👩‍👧) and ligatures in scripts like Arabic.

Complete Reference

Codepoint	Name	HTML	JS Escape	UTF-8	Category
U+0009	<control>	` `	`\u0009`	`09`	Cc
U+00A0	No-break Space	` `	`\u00A0`	`C2 A0`	Zs
U+00AD	Soft Hyphen	``	`\u00AD`	`C2 AD`	Cf
U+034F	Combining Grapheme Joiner	`͏`	`\u034F`	`CD 8F`	Mn
U+061C	Arabic Letter Mark	`؜`	`\u061C`	`D8 9C`	Cf
U+115F	Hangul Choseong Filler	`ᅟ`	`\u115F`	`E1 85 9F`	Lo
U+1160	Hangul Jungseong Filler	`ᅠ`	`\u1160`	`E1 85 A0`	Lo
U+17B4	Khmer Vowel Inherent Aq	`឴`	`\u17B4`	`E1 9E B4`	Mn
U+17B5	Khmer Vowel Inherent Aa	`឵`	`\u17B5`	`E1 9E B5`	Mn
U+180B	Mongolian Free Variation Selector One	`᠋`	`\u180B`	`E1 A0 8B`	Mn
U+180C	Mongolian Free Variation Selector Two	`᠌`	`\u180C`	`E1 A0 8C`	Mn
U+180D	Mongolian Free Variation Selector Three	`᠍`	`\u180D`	`E1 A0 8D`	Mn
U+180E	Mongolian Vowel Separator	`᠎`	`\u180E`	`E1 A0 8E`	Cf
U+2000	En Quad	` `	`\u2000`	`E2 80 80`	Zs
U+2001	Em Quad	` `	`\u2001`	`E2 80 81`	Zs
U+2002	En Space	` `	`\u2002`	`E2 80 82`	Zs
U+2003	Em Space	` `	`\u2003`	`E2 80 83`	Zs
U+2004	Three-per-em Space	` `	`\u2004`	`E2 80 84`	Zs
U+2005	Four-per-em Space	` `	`\u2005`	`E2 80 85`	Zs
U+2006	Six-per-em Space	` `	`\u2006`	`E2 80 86`	Zs
U+2007	Figure Space	` `	`\u2007`	`E2 80 87`	Zs
U+2008	Punctuation Space	` `	`\u2008`	`E2 80 88`	Zs
U+2009	Thin Space	` `	`\u2009`	`E2 80 89`	Zs
U+200A	Hair Space	` `	`\u200A`	`E2 80 8A`	Zs
U+200B	Zero Width Space	``	`\u200B`	`E2 80 8B`	Cf
U+200C	Zero Width Non-joiner	`‌`	`\u200C`	`E2 80 8C`	Cf
U+200D	Zero Width Joiner	`‍`	`\u200D`	`E2 80 8D`	Cf
U+200E	Left-to-right Mark	`‎`	`\u200E`	`E2 80 8E`	Cf
U+200F	Right-to-left Mark	`‏`	`\u200F`	`E2 80 8F`	Cf
U+202A	Left-to-right Embedding	`‪`	`\u202A`	`E2 80 AA`	Cf
U+202B	Right-to-left Embedding	`‫`	`\u202B`	`E2 80 AB`	Cf
U+202C	Pop Directional Formatting	`‬`	`\u202C`	`E2 80 AC`	Cf
U+202D	Left-to-right Override	`‭`	`\u202D`	`E2 80 AD`	Cf
U+202E	Right-to-left Override	`‮`	`\u202E`	`E2 80 AE`	Cf
U+202F	Narrow No-break Space	` `	`\u202F`	`E2 80 AF`	Zs
U+205F	Medium Mathematical Space	` `	`\u205F`	`E2 81 9F`	Zs
U+2060	Word Joiner	`⁠`	`\u2060`	`E2 81 A0`	Cf
U+2061	Function Application	`⁡`	`\u2061`	`E2 81 A1`	Cf
U+2062	Invisible Times	`⁢`	`\u2062`	`E2 81 A2`	Cf
U+2063	Invisible Separator	`⁣`	`\u2063`	`E2 81 A3`	Cf
U+2064	Invisible Plus	`⁤`	`\u2064`	`E2 81 A4`	Cf
U+206A	Inhibit Symmetric Swapping	`⁪`	`\u206A`	`E2 81 AA`	Cf
U+206B	Activate Symmetric Swapping	`⁫`	`\u206B`	`E2 81 AB`	Cf
U+206C	Inhibit Arabic Form Shaping	`⁬`	`\u206C`	`E2 81 AC`	Cf
U+206D	Activate Arabic Form Shaping	`⁭`	`\u206D`	`E2 81 AD`	Cf
U+206E	National Digit Shapes	`⁮`	`\u206E`	`E2 81 AE`	Cf
U+206F	Nominal Digit Shapes	`⁯`	`\u206F`	`E2 81 AF`	Cf
U+3000	Ideographic Space	`　`	`\u3000`	`E3 80 80`	Zs
U+FEFF	Zero Width No-break Space	``	`\uFEFF`	`EF BB BF`	Cf
U+FFA0	Halfwidth Hangul Filler	`ﾠ`	`\uFFA0`	`EF BE A0`	Lo
U+1D159	Musical Symbol Null Notehead	`𝅙`	`\uD834\uDD59`	`F0 9D 85 99`	So
U+1D173	Musical Symbol Begin Beam	`𝅳`	`\uD834\uDD73`	`F0 9D 85 B3`	Cf

Detecting Hidden Characters

To strip zero-width characters from user input in JavaScript:

// Remove the most common invisible characters
str.replace(/[\u200B-\u200D\uFEFF\u00AD\u2060]/g, '')

In Python:

import unicodedata
''.join(c for c in text if unicodedata.category(c) not in ('Cf', 'Zs') or c == ' ')