Find the hidden characters breaking pasted text

The job

Text copied from a web page, a Word document, or a spreadsheet often carries characters you cannot see: no-break spaces where you typed normal spaces, full-width ideographic spaces from Japanese input, zero-width spaces left by rich-text editors, and stray carriage returns from Windows line endings. They are why "the same" text fails to match.

How to do it

Paste the suspect text and run the visualizer. Each invisible character becomes a visible mark — · for a space, → for a tab, ␣ for a no-break space, □ for an ideographic space, and bracketed names like [ZWSP] for zero-width characters — with a per-type count beside the marked-up text.

• A `␣` where you expected `·` is the classic reason a find fails: a no-break space is not a space.
• [CR] at every line end means the file uses CRLF endings — convert them with the newline converter.
• Zero-width marks inside a word explain why two identical-looking strings are different.

Worked example

A product name refuses to match in a lookup table. Pasted into the visualizer it shows `Alpha␣Pro` — a no-break space copied from a webpage instead of a normal space. One character explains the failed match.

Limits

The visualizer inspects, it does not clean — the marked-up text is for reading, not for reuse. Once you know what is there, remove it in your editor or with a cleanup tool. Characters not in the counted categories pass through unchanged.