Find & Remove Hidden Zero-Width Characters Detect and remove hidden zero-width and invisible characters in text.

A zero-width character detector is a tool that scans text for hidden invisible Unicode characters that can't be seen but affect text processing, including Zero-Width Space (U+200B), Zero-Width Non-Joiner (U+200C), and Word Joiner (U+2060). Developers and security researchers use it to identify potential issues in their code or data, such as bugs caused by invisible characters that break string comparisons. One specific problem it solves is detecting hidden characters used in homograph attacks, where an attacker uses invisible Unicode characters to manipulate text and deceive users.

The tool is particularly useful for finding zero-width space in text and detecting invisible Unicode characters like the Soft Hyphen (U+00AD) and BOM (U+FEFF). What makes it different is its ability to not only detect these characters but also remove them from the text, providing a cleaned version of the input. It achieves this by iterating over each character in the input string, checking if it matches any of the known zero-width characters defined in the ZERO_WIDTH_CHARS record, and if so, adding it to a list of found characters.

It uses a callback function onProcess to handle the detection and cleaning process, which returns a detailed report including the position and Unicode code point of each detected character, making it an effective invisible character finder. The report also includes the cleaned text with all hidden characters removed, allowing users to easily identify and fix issues caused by these characters.