SMORTLER VioScans
Violet's original hunt

Ordinary-looking text has places to hide.

Violet began by hunting the tiny things that make technical people question reality: hidden Unicode, non-breaking spaces, zero-width characters, smart punctuation, encoding debris, and symbols that look harmless until a comparison fails.

β€œIf the character is there, I will find where it is hiding.” β€” Violet
Printable ASCII 0x20–0x7E Tabs + line endings allowed TXT Β· CSV Β· TSV Β· LOG Β· XLSX
Start the Hunt ↓
Violet looking inside a dark closet for hidden trouble
Look where no one else looked.Hidden things tend to like dark corners.
Character Hunter

Bring Violet the text.

Paste it directly or upload a supported file. Violet will count every non-keyboard character, identify its Unicode code point, and show the exact line where it appears.

Violet's rule: If two values look identical but behave differently, inspect the characters before blaming the database.
Or offer Violet a fileMaximum 5 MB Β· TXT, CSV, TSV, LOG or XLSX
Clear
Violet studying a large screen filled with binary digits
What your eyes miss

The difference can be one invisible character.

Two strings can look identical and still fail to match. One copied value can contain a non-breaking space. A zero-width character can survive repeated visual inspection. A smart quote can turn a working command into a mystery.

VISIBLEACCOUNT 1001 ACTUALACCOUNTΒ·1001

Violet does not guess. She counts, names, and locates the difference.

Where strange characters come from

Technical text has a long bookshelf of ways to get weird.

Shell tools, frameworks, databases, copied documentation, browsers, editors, email, office files and pasted code all have opportunities to introduce characters you did not intend.

Copy + pasteInvisible spaces and punctuation arrive quietly.
Encoding changesUTF-8, legacy encodings and conversions can collide.
Office + web contentTypography can become data when pasted into code.
Imports + exportsCSV, Excel and vendor data can preserve surprises.
Take the full Census of Symbols β†’
Violet examining a bookshelf of programming and systems books
Character Hunter

Some characters hide in plain sight. Others are completely invisible.

Violet sees them all, names them, counts them, and points directly to the line where they thought no one would ever look.

Hunt Another Mystery ↑