TextLens — Text Diff & Invisible Character Inspector

Strings look identical, but your code says otherwise?

Meet TextLens, a lightweight text comparison and invisible-character inspector that runs entirely in your browser.

Spot subtle text issues fast

• Compare two text samples side by side with character-level highlighting.
• Reveal spaces, tabs, CRLF/LF/CR line endings, non-breaking spaces, zero-width spaces, BOM and Unicode format characters.
• Click a marked character to inspect its Unicode code point and position.
• Check UTF-8 byte counts, character counts, line endings and unusual-character counts.
• Import local UTF-8 files, normalize line endings, trim trailing whitespace or remove common invisible markers. Undo your last cleanup.
• Download a diagnostics report that excludes the source text.

Built for developers, QA engineers, technical support and anyone debugging “identical” text.

Free. No installation. Local processing.

The TextLens app has no backend, third-party scripts or telemetry, and does not send your input to a server. Once loaded, the app works without an internet connection. The surrounding itch.io website has its own services and privacy practices.

How to use

1. Click Run tool.
2. Paste two text samples, or use Import to load local UTF-8 files.
3. Click Load example for a quick demo of hidden spaces and line endings.
4. Review the highlighted differences and click marked symbols for details.

Use the fullscreen button for a larger workspace. Desktop and mobile browsers are supported.

Useful details

• File imports are limited to 2 MiB and decoded as UTF-8.
• For reliable original CRLF/CR detection, prefer file import. Editing text may normalize line endings; clipboard behavior varies by browser.
• The preview shows the first 5,500 Unicode code points per side. Statistics and the first-mismatch check use the full input. Large changed regions use approximate highlighting.
• Inputs are not saved after closing or reloading the tool.

Version 1.0.0 · HTML, CSS & JavaScript · MIT licensed.