Question 1

What are invisible Unicode characters?

Accepted Answer

Characters like zero-width space (U+200B), zero-width joiner (U+200D), and byte order mark (U+FEFF) render as blank but affect string length, comparison, and sorting — common sources of hard-to-find bugs.

Question 2

Why does the same text have different byte sizes?

Accepted Answer

UTF-8 uses 1–4 bytes per character (ASCII is 1 byte, CJK is 3). UTF-16 uses 2 or 4 bytes. The inspector shows all encodings so you can estimate storage or network payload size accurately.

String Inspector