What is a zero-width space?
By the Remove AI Watermarking team · Updated
Short answer: A zero-width space is an invisible Unicode character (U+200B) that takes up no space on screen. It tells software where a line may break, but when it ends up in copied text it silently breaks code, searches, passwords and word counts.
Key facts
- Code point: U+200B. HTML entity: ​.
- Related invisible characters: zero-width joiner (U+200D), zero-width non-joiner (U+200C), word joiner (U+2060) and byte order mark (U+FEFF).
- It is common in text copied from web pages, chat apps and PDFs.
- Most editors don't show it; a cleaner or a 'show invisibles' mode does.
How to spot one
Signs include a word that won't match in search, a cursor that needs two key presses to move past a spot, or code that throws an 'unexpected character' error on a line that looks fine.
How to remove it
Paste your text into the AI Text Cleaner. Every zero-width character is highlighted and removed. In code editors you can also search with the regular expression [\u200B-\u200D\u2060\uFEFF] and replace with nothing.
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