Question 1

What are Unicode homoglyphs?

Accepted Answer

Unicode homoglyphs are characters from different scripts (like Cyrillic or Greek) that look visually identical or very similar to Latin letters. For example, the Cyrillic 'a' (U+0430) looks exactly like the Latin 'a' but is a completely different character. Text using homoglyphs can bypass simple keyword filters while appearing normal to human readers.

Question 2

What is Zalgo text?

Accepted Answer

Zalgo text is created by stacking combining diacritical marks (accent characters) above and below standard characters. The result looks like corrupted or glitchy text with characters that seem to bleed into each other. It uses valid Unicode combining characters but overwhelms the normal rendering of text.

Question 3

What are zero-width characters used for?

Accepted Answer

Zero-width characters are invisible Unicode code points that take up no visual space. They can be inserted between visible characters to break keyword matching in content filters, watermark text for tracking purposes, or fingerprint documents. Common zero-width characters include the Zero Width Space (U+200B), Zero Width Joiner (U+200D), and Zero Width Non-Joiner (U+200C).

Text Obfuscator