# Text to Unicode Guide

Show the Unicode code points of a string, and rebuild a string from them.

- Tool: https://ilham.dev/tools/text-to-unicode/
- Guide URL: https://ilham.dev/guides/text-to-unicode/
- Tool guides index: https://ilham.dev/guides/tools/
- Broader guide: Text Formatting and Cleanup (https://ilham.dev/guides/text-formatting-and-cleanup/)

## 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 https://ilham.dev/tools/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.