Unicode Inspector — Inspect Unicode Characters, Codepoints, and UTF-8 Bytes
Inspect any Unicode character — codepoint, block, UTF-8/UTF-16 bytes, HTML entities, and escape sequences. All processing in your browser.
Unicode Inspector
Analyze any text character by character. View Unicode codepoints, UTF-8 bytes, JavaScript/JSON escape sequences, and HTML entities. Perfect for debugging encoding issues. Works entirely in your browser.
Unicode is the universal character encoding standard that covers every writing system in active use — Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Devanagari, CJK, and 150+ more scripts — plus emoji, mathematical symbols, musical notation, and technical marks. Every character has a unique codepoint (written as U+ followed by 4 to 6 hex digits), a formal name, a block classification, and multiple byte-level representations. Debugging a character encoding issue — a garbled accented letter, an invisible space that breaks a regex, an emoji that renders differently across platforms — starts with knowing exactly which codepoint is in the text.
The Unicode Inspector identifies any pasted character and displays its full specification: the codepoint in standard notation, the Unicode block name, the UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 byte sequences, and every escape form a developer might need — HTML numeric entity, CSS backslash escape, JavaScript/Python \u and \U escapes, and percent-encoded URL form. The Show Invisibles toggle reveals zero-width spaces, non-breaking spaces, bidirectional control characters, and other invisible formatting characters that are the source of the hardest-to-find text bugs. The block browser organises characters by category for exploration, and the string view shows a summary table of every character in a pasted string — useful for inspecting a suspicious filename, a broken API response, or a text that silently contains right-to-left override characters. The tool runs entirely in your browser; no text is transmitted.
How to use
Paste or type a character
Type a single character or paste a string. The inspector shows details for the first character and a summary table for the full string. Each character's codepoint, name, block, and encoding are displayed in real-time.
Browse by Unicode block
Use the block browser to explore characters by category — Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, CJK, Emoji, Mathematical Operators, and more. Click any character to inspect its full details in the detail panel.
Copy the value you need
Copy the codepoint (U+XXXX or U+XXXXX), the UTF-8 hex bytes, the UTF-16 hex bytes, the HTML entity (`&#xXXXX;`), the CSS escape (`\XXXX`), the Python/JavaScript escape (`\uXXXX`), or the URL-encoded form.
Frequently asked
What is the difference between a codepoint and a character?
A codepoint is a number in the Unicode codespace (U+0000 to U+10FFFF). A character is what a user perceives as a single unit of text. Some characters are composed of multiple codepoints — é can be U+00E9 (precomposed) or U+0065 + U+0301 (e + combining acute accent). The inspector shows the codepoint breakdown for composed characters.
Why are there different UTF encodings?
UTF-8 (1-4 bytes per codepoint, ASCII-compatible) is the dominant encoding on the web. UTF-16 (2 or 4 bytes per codepoint, used internally by Windows and Java) and UTF-32 (always 4 bytes, fixed-width) are alternatives. The inspector shows all three byte representations for every inspected character.
How do I type a character if I only know its codepoint?
On macOS, press Ctrl+Cmd+Space, type the codepoint in the search field, and press Enter. On Linux, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type the hex codepoint, and press Enter. On Windows, hold Alt, type the decimal codepoint on the numpad, and release Alt.
Does it detect invisible characters?
Yes — zero-width spaces, non-breaking spaces, right-to-left marks, and other invisible formatting characters are displayed with a visible glyph box and their formal Unicode name. The tool includes a dedicated 'Show Invisibles' toggle that reveals all hidden characters in the input.
Limitations
- No rendering of Private Use Area charactersCharacters in the Private Use Areas (U+E000–U+F8FF, U+F0000–U+10FFFF) have no standard glyph. The inspector shows the codepoint and block but cannot render the character — the glyph depends on the font.
- No font-fallback chain displayThe tool shows the character as rendered by the browser's font stack. It does not indicate which font provided the glyph. For font-level debugging, use a browser's dev tools to inspect the element's computed font-family.
- Limited to the Basic Multilingual Plane in the block browserCharacters beyond U+FFFF (Supplementary Planes — emoji, historic scripts, CJK Extension B+) are searchable by codepoint but not fully browsable in the block viewer due to the size of the supplementary ranges.
Platform notes
- macOS
- The Character Viewer (Ctrl+Cmd+Space) is the built-in equivalent. The browser tool adds the encoding breakdown — UTF-8/16/32 bytes, escape sequences, and HTML entities — that the system viewer does not show.
- Linux
- `uniname` and `unicode` are common CLI tools. The browser tool adds visual block browsing and one-click copy of multiple escape-sequence formats — useful for web development where the same character is needed in CSS, HTML, and JavaScript contexts.
- Web
- Runs entirely in the browser. Characters are inspected locally using the browser's Unicode support — no data is transmitted.