Terms

You may use Ghostchars for anything lawful, including commercial work, with no attribution and no permission required. There is no rate limit and no signup, and nothing on this website is behind a paywall; the paid licence described below covers only the apps you install. You may not use it to attack the service itself. Automated traffic that degrades it for other people is the one thing that is not welcome.

The engine, the command-line tool and this website are published as open source. Your rights to copy, modify and redistribute that code come from the licence in the repository, not from this page; if the two ever disagree, the licence wins.

Everything on this website is free; a licence buys only the apps you install. It is one payment rather than a subscription, with no renewal date and nothing recurring to cancel, and every version 1 update is included. A version 2, if it ever exists, would be its own purchase and not an automatic charge. Anything described as coming soon is not written yet: buying a licence today does not make it arrive sooner, and no date is promised for it.

Ghostchars carries two tables derived from data published by Unicode, Inc.: the confusables table is generated from Unicode's confusables.txt, and the character property and name tables are generated from the Unicode Character Database. Copyright © 1991-2024 Unicode, Inc. All rights reserved. Distributed under the Unicode License v3, at https://www.unicode.org/license.txt. The generated files name their source in their own headers, so the notice travels with the data.

This tool is provided without warranty of any kind. It is tested against a large fixture corpus and against eleven published steganography schemes, and it is still software: verify anything that matters before you rely on it, and keep a copy of your original text. Cleaning is destructive by nature, since it removes characters, and the removal happens in your browser, where there is no undo but the copy you kept.

Ghostchars finds and removes characters. It does not detect AI-generated writing, it emits no probability, no score and no verdict about authorship, and nothing it reports should be presented as evidence that a person did or did not write something. It does not remove statistical watermarks, which live in word choice rather than in characters, and it does not perform stylometric analysis. Using its output to accuse someone of anything is a misuse of it.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for loss or damage arising from the use of this site, including text you cleaned and cannot recover, or a decision you made on the basis of what it reported. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

These terms may change. The date at the top says when they last did.