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Remove hidden characters from AI text

Paste text from ChatGPT or Claude and this cleaner strips the invisible zero-width spaces, straightens curly quotes, and swaps em dashes for plain hyphens, all in your browser.

Runs in your browser · nothing uploaded

Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you paste is uploaded or saved.

What to clean
0 characters
No hidden characters found

Text copied out of AI chat tools often carries characters you cannot see. Zero-width spaces, word joiners, soft hyphens, and no-break spaces ride along invisibly and can break word counts, trip plagiarism and AI-detection checks, or corrupt code and spreadsheet cells. This tool finds those characters, removes them, and tells you how many it caught.

It also tidies the visible typography that gives away machine-written text: it straightens curly smart quotes and apostrophes back to straight ones, turns em dashes and en dashes into plain hyphens, and collapses double spaces while trimming trailing whitespace on each line. Every toggle is on by default, and you can switch off any cleanup you want to keep. Nothing you paste is uploaded or stored.

How it works

  1. 1

    Paste your text

    Drop in anything copied from ChatGPT, Claude, or another AI tool. The cleaned version appears next to it as you type, with a count of how many hidden characters were found and removed.

  2. 2

    Pick what to clean

    Leave all four cleanups on, or turn off the ones you do not want. You can remove zero-width and invisible characters, change em dashes to hyphens, straighten smart quotes, and collapse extra spaces independently.

  3. 3

    Copy the result

    Hit copy to grab the cleaned text. It goes straight to your clipboard so you can paste it into a document, editor, or form with no invisible baggage.

Questions about cleaning AI text

How do I remove hidden characters from AI text?
Paste the text into the box and leave the invisible-characters toggle on. The tool scans for zero-width spaces (U+200B), word joiners, soft hyphens, the byte-order mark, and no-break spaces, deletes or normalizes them, and shows a running count of what it removed. Copy the cleaned output when you are done.
What is a zero width space and how do I remove it?
A zero width space is a character that takes up no visible room but still counts as text, so it can split words, inflate character counts, and confuse search or code. This zero width space remover strips it along with related invisible marks such as zero-width joiners and no-break spaces in one pass.
Why does ChatGPT text have em dashes and how do I remove them?
AI writing tends to favor em dashes and curly smart quotes as a house style, which is one reason the text reads as machine-written. Keep the dash and quote toggles on to change em and en dashes to plain hyphens and straighten smart quotes, so the text matches ordinary keyboard typing.
Is it free?
Yes. It is free with no sign up, and every cleanup runs in your browser, so nothing you paste is uploaded or saved anywhere.

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