How zero-width character cleaner works
Zero-width characters are real Unicode code points with no visible glyph: the zero width space (U+200B), zero width non-joiner (U+200C), zero width joiner (U+200D), word joiner (U+2060) and the byte-order mark (U+FEFF), which behaves as an invisible no-break space anywhere except the very start of a file. They travel invisibly inside copy-pasted text and then cause very visible problems: identifiers that fail equality checks, search terms that match nothing, diffs that show phantom changes and hashes that no longer match.
This cleaner scans your text code point by code point, counts every hit of each zero-width character, records the first 100 positions where they occur, and strips them. You get the cleaned text ready to copy, a per-character breakdown showing exactly what was removed, and the byte-length savings — because U+FEFF costs three bytes in UTF-8 and the others cost three bytes too, the file gets smaller as well as cleaner.
Paste text copied from web pages, chat apps, PDFs or word processors and it reports honestly: found nothing means the text was already clean. Note that the zero width joiner is a legitimate part of emoji sequences like the family or rainbow-flag emoji, so if your text depends on those, do not clean it — the tool is for prose, code and data, not emoji art.