A short companion for Text to Unicode: when it is useful, what it expects, and what to check before using the result.

What it does

Show the Unicode code points behind a piece of text, as U+XXXX escapes and as decimal values, and turn those escapes back into text. It is the quickest way to find out what an invisible or look-alike character actually is.

Use the tool

Open Text to Unicode, add the input the tool asks for, run it, and check the output before using it elsewhere.

Input and output

  • Input: text.
  • Output: text.
  • Category: Encoding.

Privacy and processing

Processing happens locally in your browser. This tool does not upload the input to ilham.dev.

Questions

What is the difference between a code point and a UTF-8 byte?

A code point is the abstract character number. UTF-8 is one particular way of writing that number as bytes, so the same code point can occupy a different number of bytes in a different encoding.

Why does text I copied have an invisible character in it?

Usually a zero-width space or a non-breaking space picked up from a web page or a word processor. Listing the code points is what makes it visible.

Related guide

For broader background, see Text Formatting and Cleanup.