ZWSP Cleaner

Removes invisible zero-width characters from copied text on websites.

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Example

Here’s an example text containing a zero-width space (U+200B):

Hello​World

It looks normal - but if you move the cursor between the words, there’s an invisible character.
After cleaning, it becomes:

HelloWorld

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How to test

Go to this page,
paste any text that might contain invisible characters, and click “Show me the characters.”
You’ll see if any hidden Unicode symbols (like U+200B or ZWSP) are present.

Note: You can safely ignore standard whitespace symbols such as CR, LF, or TAB -
these are normal line breaks and indentation characters, not invisible zero-width characters.

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Why this exists

When copying from some websites (like ChatGPT), hidden zero-width characters may be inserted automatically.
These characters are invisible and can only be seen when specifically searching for them.

This project provides:

1. A Tampermonkey userscript that cleans copied text directly in the browser
2. A browser extension (for Chrome/Firefox) that cleans clipboard content globally

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Installation

1. Tampermonkey Userscript

Requirements:
Tampermonkey installed in your browser.

Steps:

1. Click this link to open the userscript directly in Tampermonkey
   • or open the Tampermonkey dashboard → Create a new script and paste the contents of zwsp-cleaner.user.js
2. Save and enable the script
3. Visit any website and copy some text → zero-width characters will be removed automatically

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2. Browser Extension

Requirements:
A Chromium-based browser (Chrome, Edge, Brave) or Firefox.

Steps (Chromium):

1. Clone or download this repository
2. Open chrome://extensions/
3. Enable Developer mode
4. Click Load unpacked and select the zwsp-cleaner-extension/ folder
5. The extension will now monitor and clean clipboard content automatically

Steps (Firefox):

1. Open about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox
2. Click Load Temporary Add-on
3. Select the manifest.json file inside the zwsp-cleaner-extension/ directory

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How it works

Both the userscript and the extension remove these Unicode characters:

Unicode	Description
U+200B	Zero Width Space
U+200C	Zero Width Non-Joiner
U+200D	Zero Width Joiner
U+FEFF	Zero Width No-Break Space (BOM)

They run a simple regular expression on every copied text and overwrite the clipboard content with the cleaned version.