Character Inspector

How to use it

Type or paste text into the box and the table below fills in on every keystroke, one row per character. There is no button to press, and the whole analysis runs in your browser, so nothing is uploaded — which makes it safe for text you would rather not send anywhere. Each row shows three things about a character. The decimal code point is the character's number in the Unicode standard; the U+XXXX form is that same number written in the hexadecimal notation used throughout Unicode documentation; and the UTF-8 bytes are how the character is actually stored on disk or sent over a network, listed as uppercase two-digit hex values separated by spaces. Seeing all three side by side makes it clear how an abstract character maps to concrete bytes. The text is split by code point rather than by raw code unit, so an emoji or other astral character appears as a single row with its full byte sequence instead of being torn into broken surrogate halves. To keep the table responsive, up to 500 characters are inspected at once, which is plenty for inspecting a tricky word, a suspicious paste, or a short snippet. As a worked example, a plain capital A is code point 65, written U+0041, and stored as the single byte 41. An accented e — é — is code point 233, written U+00E9, and stored as the two bytes C3 A9. A grinning-face emoji is code point 128512, written U+1F600, and stored as the four bytes F0 9F 98 80, which is why it takes more space than a letter. Inspecting characters this way is useful for debugging encoding problems, spotting invisible or look-alike characters that break a form or a search, checking why a string is longer in bytes than it looks, or simply learning how Unicode and UTF-8 fit together.

Frequently asked questions

How are emoji handled?

Text is split by Unicode code point, so an emoji like 😀 is shown as one character (U+1F600) with its full UTF-8 byte sequence, not as broken surrogate halves.

What's the difference between code point and UTF-8 bytes?

The code point is the character's number in the Unicode standard (e.g. U+00E9 for é). UTF-8 bytes are how that code point is stored — é is two bytes, C3 A9.

Is my text uploaded?

No. Everything is analyzed in your browser; your text is never sent to a server.

Can it help me find invisible or look-alike characters?

Yes. Every character gets its own row with a code point, so zero-width spaces, non-breaking spaces, and letters that look identical but have different code points all show up distinctly — handy for debugging a form, search, or paste that behaves unexpectedly.