Unicode Character Inspector

About the Unicode Character Inspector

Unicode gives every character a number called a code point, written U+ followed by at least four hexadecimal digits, from U+0000 to U+10FFFF. A code point is not always what a reader sees as one character. The letter e with an acute accent can be one code point, U+00E9, or two, U+0065 followed by the combining accent U+0301, and the family emoji is five code points joined by zero width joiners yet is drawn as one picture. The tool therefore reports three counts: code points, visible characters (grapheme clusters, as the browser segments them) and the length JavaScript reports, which counts UTF-16 units. Characters above U+FFFF, such as most emoji, take two UTF-16 units, called a surrogate pair. In UTF-8 a code point takes 1 byte up to U+007F, 2 bytes up to U+07FF, 3 bytes up to U+FFFF and 4 bytes above that, so the word cafe with an accent is 5 bytes when composed and 6 when decomposed. Each code point is shown with its two letter general category, such as Lu for an uppercase letter, Nd for a decimal digit or Zs for a space, and with its script, such as Latin, Greek or Cyrillic, which helps find look-alike letters from another alphabet. Invisible characters are highlighted: the zero width space, the zero width joiner and non-joiner, the no-break space, the byte order mark and the directional marks. They explain why two strings that look the same do not compare as equal. Up to 2,000 characters are shown at once. Nothing is uploaded.