Unicode Explorer
Search and inspect Unicode characters by name, code point, or symbol
Try: © · → · ∑ · U+2603 · 9733 · "arrow left" · "greek"
About this tool
The Unicode Explorer lets you look up any Unicode character by symbol, name, or code point. Enter a character to see its official Unicode name, code point (decimal and hex), UTF-8 encoding, HTML entity, and Unicode block. Search by name to find the right symbol for your content.
When to use it
- →Finding the correct Unicode code point for special characters in source code
- →Identifying mystery characters in logs, API responses, or user input
- →Getting HTML entity values for symbols in web content
- →Exploring emoji code points and Unicode blocks for internationalization work
Tips
- ◆You can search by name (e.g., 'snowflake', 'arrow left') to find symbols without knowing their code point.
- ◆Paste a string with multiple characters to inspect all of them at once — useful for debugging encoding issues.
- ◆Zero-width characters (U+200B, U+FEFF) are invisible but can cause comparison bugs — the explorer will reveal them.
Frequently asked questions
What is Unicode and why was it created?
Unicode is a universal character encoding standard that assigns a unique number (code point) to every character in every writing system — over 140,000 characters covering 150+ scripts, plus emoji, symbols, and control characters. Before Unicode, dozens of incompatible encodings (ASCII, Latin-1, Shift-JIS, GB2312) made text exchange between systems and languages unreliable. Unicode, now in version 15+, is the universal standard for all modern text.
What is the difference between Unicode and UTF-8?
Unicode is the character set — the assignment of numbers to characters. UTF-8 is one encoding of those numbers into bytes. UTF-8 uses 1-4 bytes per character: ASCII characters (U+0000-U+007F) use 1 byte; Latin and common symbols use 2; most CJK characters use 3; rare characters and emoji use 4. UTF-8 is backward-compatible with ASCII and is the dominant encoding on the web.
What are zero-width characters and why do they cause bugs?
Zero-width characters are Unicode code points that occupy no visual space: U+200B (Zero Width Space), U+200C (Zero Width Non-Joiner), U+200D (Zero Width Joiner), U+FEFF (BOM). They are invisible in most editors and UIs. They cause comparison bugs because 'hello' and 'hello' look identical but are not string-equal. They appear in text copied from PDFs, web pages, and word processors.
How do I type or insert Unicode characters I can't find on my keyboard?
On Windows: hold Alt and type the decimal code on the numpad (Alt+0169 for copyright). Or use Win+. for the emoji picker, or type the hex code in Word then press Alt+X. On macOS: System Preferences > Keyboard > Show Emoji & Symbols, or use the Character Viewer. In code: use escape sequences — \u00A9 in JavaScript/Python, © or © in HTML.