OneTaskBy Tim King · Updated
Unicode Confusables Detector
Cyrillic, Greek and Fullwidth Lookalikes and Zero-Width Marks Hidden in Pasted Text
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How the Unicode Confusables Detector works
This Unicode confusables detector finds characters that look like ordinary letters and symbols but are something else. Paste a message, username, domain or line of code and it lists every lookalike and invisible character, with its code point, script and the ASCII character it imitates.
What the Unicode confusables detector finds
Unicode contains many characters that render almost exactly like Latin letters. Cyrillic а, Greek ο, Armenian օ and Cherokee Ꭺ are the classic examples. Fullwidth letters such as ｐ and the mathematical bold alphabet such as 𝐛 look like styled text but are separate characters. Invisible marks such as the zero-width space and the right-to-left override change how text behaves without showing anything.
Attackers use these to build usernames that impersonate someone, links that pass a visual check, filter-dodging spam and source code whose logic differs from how it reads (the Trojan Source attack).
Report lists each suspicious character once, with how often it appears. Accented Latin letters are included because they can stand in for plain ones, so expect them in ordinary French or German text. ASCII skeleton rewrites the text with every lookalike replaced by the character it imitates and invisible marks removed, which is how you compare two strings the way a reader would.
FAQ
Is text with confusable characters always malicious?
No. Russian, Greek and Armenian text is full of letters that happen to look Latin, and accented names are normal. It becomes suspicious when a lookalike appears inside otherwise English text, a domain, a username or source code.
What are zero-width characters used for?
Legitimately, they control joining in scripts such as Arabic and Indic languages and mark allowed line breaks. They are also used to fingerprint leaked documents, break keyword filters and hide differences between two strings that look the same.
How do I remove these characters from my own text?
Switch the output to ASCII skeleton and copy the result. Check it afterwards, because the skeleton also turns genuine foreign words into Latin letters, which is right for comparison but not always for publishing.
See also: all Security & Identifiers tools, Dev Utilities, Formatters & Validators, Data & Encoding, SEO, Accessibility, AI.
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