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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-21T23:07:41+00:00

I’m parsing some files that contain invisible characters. The files are structured strangely so

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I’m parsing some files that contain invisible characters. The files are structured strangely so that I sometimes have to find real information after 9 or 10 invisible characters. Yeah…

Anyway, I have some files that seem to have invisible characters that my regex doesn’t yet know about. Is there some way to pass a character through a function to look up it’s character code? Since it’s invisible, I don’t really have much else to go on, ha.

Currently I’m using the following regular expression to find invisible characters. (found from this question)

public $invisibles='\x00-\x09\x0B\x0C\x0E-\x1F\x7F';
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Yours are control characters. But another real invisible character is \xA0 the non-breaking space.

    Anyway to find out which is bugging you, first isolate it (substr if you can), and then pass it through ord() to get the ASCII number: 

    preg_match('/\W/', $str, $match);   // find first non-letter
print dechex(ord($match[0]));

    (dechex is for printing it out as hex)

    Though really, you should just download a hexeditor for such purposes.

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