This page finds U+00AD SOFT HYPHEN and removes it. The sample below contains two — words copied from a hyphenating PDF. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
An invisible hyphenation hint: it renders as nothing unless the word happens to break across a line, at which point a hyphen appears. It's HTML's ­. Copied into plain text, it just lurks inside words.
Copy-pasting from PDFs is the classic source — justified, hyphenated text keeps its soft hyphens on the clipboard. Word processors with automatic hyphenation and some news/publishing sites insert them too.
Search: documentation won't match documentation, in your editor, your database, or Ctrl+F. String comparison and deduplication fail the same way. In terminals and logs it sometimes surfaces as a stray - or  mojibake. Spellcheckers flag perfectly good words.
VS Code: regex-search \u00ad. Command line: grep -rP '\x{00AD}' . — or paste the text above; every soft hyphen is flagged (SHY) and stripped from the output.
Guides for the common cleanup jobs — what the source puts into your text, exactly what it breaks, and the tool preloaded with a demonstration:
AI-generated text · Text copied from Word / Google Docs · Text copied from a PDF · Pasted code that won’t run · CSV & spreadsheet data · Invisible watermarks · Many files at once (batch)
Dedicated pages for the usual suspects — what each one is, where it sneaks in from, the exact errors it causes, and how to find it in your editor:
Zero-width space (U+200B) · Non-breaking space (U+00A0) · Byte order mark (BOM) (U+FEFF) · Soft hyphen (U+00AD) · Smart quotes · Em dash (U+2014) · Narrow no-break space (U+202F) · Ideographic space (U+3000) · Zero-width joiner (U+200D) · Zero-width non-joiner (U+200C) · Word joiner (U+2060) · Right-to-left override (U+202E) · Left-to-right mark (U+200E) · Line separator (U+2028) · Variation selector-16 (U+FE0F) · Object replacement character (U+FFFC) · Hangul filler (U+3164) · Braille pattern blank (U+2800) · Ligatures · Minus sign (U+2212)
Страницы на русском — те же инструменты с переведёнными правилами и примерами под задачу:
Невидимые символы в тексте · Убрать невидимые символы · Почистить текст нейросети · Неразрывные пробелы в числах · Текст из Word · Код не запускается