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Unicode Character Inspector

Paste text or an emoji and see exactly which code points, bytes and scripts it is made of.

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What is Unicode Character Inspector?

Unicode gives every character a number, its code point, and different encodings store that number differently: UTF-8 uses 1 to 4 bytes, UTF-16 uses one or two 16-bit units. Knowing the exact code points explains mysterious bugs: invisible zero-width spaces, look-alike Cyrillic letters, accents built from combining marks, or a family emoji that is really five code points.

This inspector works as a character inspector, emoji code point viewer and UTF-8 byte viewer in one. For each code point (or, if you choose, each visible grapheme cluster, using Intl.Segmenter when your browser provides it) it lists the character, U+ code point, decimal value, UTF-8 bytes, UTF-16 units, HTML entity, general category (Lu, Ll, So, Cf…) and script (Latin, Han, Cyrillic, Common…). A summary counts characters, code points, UTF-16 units and UTF-8 bytes and tells you if the text is ASCII-only or in NFC form.

How does it work?

  1. Paste or type any text, emoji or suspicious string.
  2. Choose one row per code point (default) or per grapheme (visible character).
  3. Read the table (first 500 items) and the summary; control and invisible characters are shown with visible symbols.

Common use cases

  • Finding invisible characters such as zero-width space (U+200B) or a byte order mark in copied text.
  • Seeing why a string looks identical to another but does not match (look-alike letters or different normalisation).
  • Learning how emoji sequences are built from several code points and joiners.
  • Calculating the byte length of text in UTF-8 for database column or API limits.

Examples

Try this input in the tool above:

Input
Héllo 👨‍👩‍👧 世界
Output
U+0048 U+00E9 U+006C U+006C U+006F U+0020 U+1F468 U+200D U+1F469 U+200D U+1F467 U+0020 U+4E16 U+754C

Privacy

Unicode Character Inspector runs entirely in your browser. The text or files you provide are processed on your device and are not uploaded, logged or stored on our servers.

Limitations

Character names are not included, and scripts are shown for the most common writing systems (others appear as "Other"). Analysis stops after 200,000 characters and the table shows 500 rows.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between a code point and a grapheme?

A code point is one Unicode number. A grapheme is what you see as one character; it may be several code points, such as "e" plus a combining accent or a flag made of two regional indicators.

Why does 😀 have two UTF-16 units?

UTF-16 units are 16 bits, so code points above U+FFFF are stored as a surrogate pair (D83D DE00). In UTF-8 the same character is four bytes: F0 9F 98 80.

What do category and script mean?

Category is the Unicode general category (Lu = uppercase letter, Nd = decimal digit, Cf = invisible format character…). Script tells which writing system the character belongs to; punctuation and emoji are usually "Common".

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