TextWash

This page finds U+FFFC OBJECT REPLACEMENT CHARACTER — the ghost an embedded image leaves in copied text — and removes it. The sample below contains one. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

Input

X-ray hover a highlight for details

Cleaned output copied ✓

Cleaning rules

What is U+FFFC (object replacement character)?

A placeholder that rich-text systems use internally to mean "an embedded object sits here" — an image, an attachment, a mention chip. When the rich text becomes plain text, the object can't come along, but the placeholder often does. Most fonts render it as nothing or as a small  box.

Where it comes from

Copying out of Word, Apple Notes, Pages, Slack, Google Docs or an email client when the selection includes an inline image, emoji-as-image, or attachment icon. iOS text fields are a common source: paste from Notes and a stray U+FFFC rides along where a photo was.

What it breaks

It's junk data: it pollutes database fields, breaks exact-match lookups, trips "printable characters only" validators, shows up as an empty box in other fonts, and confuses downstream parsers that didn't expect a character from the Specials block. Because it renders as almost nothing, it survives proofreading.

How to find it

VS Code: regex-search \ufffc. Command line: grep -rP '\x{FFFC}' . — or paste the text above: each one is flagged (OBJ) and the cleaned output drops them. If you're seeing � (question-mark diamond) instead, that's U+FFFD, the replacement character — a sign of an encoding error, which this tool flags as "other non-ASCII".