Unicode Character Inspector

Overview

Inspects any text character by character: each row shows the glyph, its Unicode code point in U+XXXX notation, its decimal entity form, and a hint of which script block it belongs to. Headline counters compare character count against JavaScript's own length and the true UTF-8 byte size, exposing the difference at a glance.

How It Works

Paste text into the input box — the default sample deliberately mixes Latin accents, CJK and an emoji. Three stat tiles appear immediately: Characters (code points), Code units (JS length) and UTF-8 bytes. The table below lists every character in order, capped at 200 rows for performance. Type to explore: an invisible character shows as a blank row with a telling code point, and emoji demonstrate the character-versus-code-unit gap.

Step-by-Step Usage Guide

1. Paste the text you want to dissect into the input box.
2. Compare the three counters: if Characters is smaller than Code units, your text contains surrogate pairs; if Bytes is larger still, multi-byte encodings are present.
3. Scan the table for the suspicious character — invisible or unusual characters stand out as blank or rare code points.
4. Use the U+XXXX value to search the Unicode charts, or copy the entity form for HTML use.

Technical Specifications & Standards

The tool's central lesson is the three-layer model of text. Characters are counted by iterating code points (Array.from), so the globe emoji is one character; JavaScript's .length counts UTF-16 code units, so the same emoji is 2 (a surrogate pair); and TextEncoder counts the UTF-8 bytes, 4 for that emoji. Each table row gives the character, its code point in standard U+ uppercase-hex notation padded to at least four digits, and its decimal numeric HTML entity (&#NNN;) for embedding in HTML — one column quirk to know: the column labelled Hex actually displays the decimal entity form. Block hints come from a small range table — CJK Unified, Cyrillic, Arabic, Latin Extended, Symbols, Emoji — which is a coarse guide, not the Unicode character database: a character outside the listed ranges is labelled Punctuation as a catch-all. The honest limitation: this is an inspector, not a name lookup — it tells you where a character lives and how it is encoded, but not its official Unicode name, and combining characters (accents typed as separate marks) each get their own row.

Targeted Use Cases

• Finding the invisible character breaking a password rule, form validation or string comparison.
• Debugging why a string's length disagrees with its visible character count.
• Identifying lookalike characters — a Cyrillic a inside an English word — that defeat naive text matching.
• Learning how accented characters, CJK and emoji decompose into code points, code units and bytes.

Notes & Gotchas

• Copy the U+ code point, not the character itself, when reporting a mystery character — pasting may lose invisible characters.
• Expect combining marks to occupy their own rows; a visually single accented letter can be two or more code points.
• Use JS length (code units) to predict what JavaScript code will compute, and Characters for what humans see.
• Treat the block hint as a starting point; verify against the official Unicode charts for anything critical.

Frequently Asked Questions