Encoding & Tokens

Unicode Character Inspector

Break any text down character by character — code point, HTML entity and UTF-8 bytes — in your browser. Works with symbols, accents and emoji.

Type or paste any text — letters, symbols, accents, emoji — and see each character’s code point, HTML entity, and UTF-8 bytes. Everything runs locally.

What’s actually in your text

Every character you see is, underneath, a Unicode code point — a number that uniquely identifies it. The letter A is U+0041; a coffee cup ☕ is U+2615. Fonts decide how a code point looks, but the code point itself is the character’s true identity.

code pointU+2615 decimal9749 HTML☕ UTF-8 bytesE2 98 95 one character · one code point · three UTF-8 bytes

Code points vs. bytes — why they differ

A code point is the character’s number; UTF-8 is how that number is stored — using 1 to 4 bytes:

CharacterCode pointUTF-8 bytes
AU+00411
éU+00E92
U+26153
🚀U+1F6804

This is exactly why a tweet of emoji “uses up” more of a character limit than it looks, and why a string’s length in code can differ from what you counted by eye.

Handy for

  • Symbols and fancy text — find the code point behind a special character so you can reuse it.
  • Emoji — see how an emoji decomposes, including multi-code-point sequences.
  • Debugging encoding — track down a stray invisible character or a ”�” that shouldn’t be there.

How to use this tool

Type or paste your text and the table updates instantly, one row per character, with a running count of code points and UTF-8 bytes. To turn a whole string into a transport-safe form, pass it to the Base64 encoder or URL encoder.

Frequently asked questions

What is a code point?

A code point is the unique number Unicode assigns to a character, written like U+2615 (a hot beverage ☕). It's the identity of the character, independent of any font or encoding.

Why does one emoji show up as several bytes?

Unicode code points are stored using an encoding — UTF-8 here — which uses 1 to 4 bytes per character. Plain ASCII letters take 1 byte; accents take 2; most symbols 3; and emoji 4. Some emoji are even several code points combined (a base plus modifiers), which is why "characters" and "bytes" rarely match.

What's the HTML entity for?

The numeric HTML entity (like ☕) lets you write any character in HTML by its code point, useful when you can't type it directly or want to avoid encoding issues.

Is my text uploaded?

No. The inspection runs entirely in your browser, so nothing you paste leaves your device.