What exactly is this character?
Paste anything (a strange symbol from a PDF, a username that looks right but won’t match, a lookalike URL) and every character is broken down:
- its official Unicode name (from the Unicode Character Database, loaded on first use);
- its code point (U+00E9);
- its general category (letter, mark, punctuation, symbol, separator, control…) and script (Latin, Cyrillic, Han…);
- its UTF-8 bytes and ready-to-use escapes for HTML and JavaScript.
Characters made of several code points (an accented letter written as two, a flag, an emoji family) are shown with each component on its own row.
Catching look-alikes
Unicode contains many characters that look identical: Latin “a” (U+0061) and Cyrillic “а” (U+0430), Latin “o” and Greek “ο”, the letter “l” and the digit “1” in some fonts. Mixing scripts is how phishing domains (“homograph attacks”) and spam that evades filters are built. If your text mixes Latin with look-alike Cyrillic or Greek letters, the inspector warns you.
Invisible characters are shown as a dot with their name; for a full scan and clean-up, use the Invisible Character Detector.
Worked example
Here is what the Unicode Character Inspector returns for its built-in example. Settings used: Show up to: 200; Each character once: off. Click Try an example in the tool above to load it, then change it as you like.
Aа fi é é ❤️ 👨👩👧 €| Result | Value |
|---|---|
| Characters | 16 |
| Code points | 21 |
| UTF-16 units | 24 |
| Look-alike letters | 1 |
Questions
How do I find the Unicode code point of a character?
Paste it here. The code point (like U+2014), official name and bytes are shown for every character.
Why does my text not match when it looks identical?
It may contain look-alike characters from another script, a different normalisation form, or invisible characters. The inspector shows exactly which code points are present.
Last reviewed · How Textkiln tools work