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Ghostchars

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Lookalike letter detector

Paste a word that looks right but fails a login, search, or exact match. This tool finds supported Cyrillic and Greek letters that resemble Latin letters and can replace them.

Updated

Nothing is uploaded. The cleaning happens on this page.

Your text is analysed in the browser. Press Clean text to see results below.

Cleanup level

Standard removes only characters you cannot see. Maximum also rewrites text you can see (look-alike letters, quotes, dashes and spacing), so it is a choice, not a default.

The defaults already remove every character that is invisible and doing no work: zero-width characters, byte-order marks, soft hyphens, invisible math operators, bidi overrides, free-floating tag characters and variation selectors, noncharacters, and other format controls. Everything below goes further than that: it either changes text you can see or removes characters that are doing a job, so you decide.

Whitespace & layout

Non-breaking, thin, and ideographic spaces become a plain space. Off because NBSP is often deliberate.
CRLF, CR, NEL, and Unicode line/paragraph separators become a plain newline.
Spaces parked at the end of a line can encode a hidden message (the SNOW technique).
Double spaces between words can carry binary data. Off because it changes fixed-width layouts.

Letters & punctuation

Cyrillic а in "аpple" becomes Latin a. Only acts inside words that mix scripts, so ordinary Russian or Greek text is untouched. Off by default because it rewrites letters.
Em dash, curly quotes, ellipsis and minus sign become ASCII. Often used as an "AI tell", but also just good typography.
Composed vs. decomposed accents (é as one character or two) can encode bits. NFC picks one form.
Also folds fullwidth, superscript and ligature forms. Changes more than you might expect, and supersedes NFC.

Controls

We already remove bidi overrides, and marks in left-to-right prose. This one also removes the marks sitting next to Hebrew or Arabic, where they do real layout work.
C0 and C1 controls other than tab and newline.
Breaks icon fonts and some brand glyphs, which is exactly where these normally live.

Aggressive

Removes every zero-width joiner and variation selector, including the ones holding 👨‍👩‍👧 together and the ones Persian, Hindi and flag sequences need. Only use this when you want plain letters and nothing else.
ZWSPTAG U+E0053

Press Clean text and we'll show you exactly what was hiding in there, in plain language first, with the codepoints underneath if you want them.

Paste the text into the cleaner above, open Advanced, switch on Fix look-alike letters and press Clean text. Each Cyrillic or Greek letter inside a Latin word is named with its real codepoint and replaced by the letter it resembles; Show what's hidden lists every position. Nothing is uploaded.

What it finds

  • U+0430 CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER A

    It is a real Cyrillic letter that can resemble a Latin letter inside mixed-script text; the confusables option replaces the supported mapping.

  • U+043E CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER O

    It is a real Cyrillic letter that can resemble a Latin letter inside mixed-script text; the confusables option replaces the supported mapping.

  • U+0435 CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER IE

    It is a real Cyrillic letter that can resemble a Latin letter inside mixed-script text; the confusables option replaces the supported mapping.

  • U+0441 CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER ES

    It is a real Cyrillic letter that can resemble a Latin letter inside mixed-script text; the confusables option replaces the supported mapping.

Example

Before cleaning

p\u0430ssw\u043Erd

After cleaning

password

Questions

How does the lookalike letter check work?

The engine compares each codepoint with its supported confusable mapping. It reports the actual script and Unicode name, then replaces the letter only when you turn on the confusables option.

Will it change normal Cyrillic or Greek writing?

The option is off by default because those are real letters in real languages. Use it for mixed-script text you intend to be Latin, and review the findings before taking the cleaned copy.

Does a lookalike letter prove who wrote the text?

No. The tool finds characters, not authors. The prose report measures writing habits and gives no verdict, score, or probability.

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Ghostchars processes your text in the browser and never uploads it. We would like to count page views with a self-hosted, cookie-light analytics endpoint. No content, ever.