Unicode Character Explorer

The Unicode character explorer indexes the blocks that matter to typography, with each block's range, size and a curated printable sample, plus an inspector for any character you paste. Samples are curated rather than generated because a whole block rendered blindly is mostly unassigned slots.

What is Unicode Character Explorer?

The Unicode character explorer pairs a searchable index of Unicode blocks with an inspector for individual characters, which is the combination that answers the two questions typography work raises: which block does this belong to, and what exactly is this character in code.

The inspector reports four encodings for any character pasted into it.

• The code point in hexadecimal with its decimal value, so the same character can be described in either notation.
• The block it belongs to, looked up by range rather than by name, which matters for characters near a boundary.
• Its utf-8 bytes and its hexadecimal HTML entity, which are the two forms a front-end task usually needs.
• A copy button for the character itself, since the point of inspecting is usually to reuse it.

The block index holds curated samples because a block rendered wholesale is mostly gaps. Basic Latin shows the Latin alphabet, digits and punctuation; Latin Extended-A shows Central and Eastern European letters; the General Punctuation block shows the dashes, quotes and invisible spacing characters that cause real layout bugs; the symbol blocks show arrows, mathematical operators, box drawing and geometric shapes; and the emoji blocks show pictographs and faces. Filtering works on the block name and on the hexadecimal range, so a code point found elsewhere can be traced to its block by typing part of its value, and a character that has already been identified can be placed without pasting it.

The framing the tool gives the list is the part worth keeping: a font's coverage is not a count of glyphs but a set of claims, and each block a family covers costs design time and file size. Display faces generally stop after Basic Latin plus a few punctuation blocks, while text families continue through Latin Extended, Greek and Cyrillic, and specialist families extend into symbols or CJK. When a glyph is missing, the browser falls back to the next family in the stack for that character alone, which is why a mixed-script page can render with three typefaces — sometimes seamlessly, sometimes not.

Four limits apply, and they are worth knowing before the index is quoted.

• The index is a curated subset of the several hundred Unicode blocks, chosen for typography rather than for completeness.
• Each sample lists printable characters only, so a block's size in code points is never the number of characters shown.
• The character inspector describes the first character of whatever is pasted, so a sentence has to be entered one character at a time.
• The UTF-8 byte count covers that first character only, which makes it useful for sizing a field and not for sizing a document.
• None of this tests a specific font: whether a chosen face carries a character is a coverage question, which the missing glyph detector answers directly.

The two halves are complementary in practice — the index narrows down where a character lives, and the inspector says exactly what it is once it has been found.

How to use Unicode Character Explorer

1. Paste the character you are working with into the inspector and read its code point, block and UTF-8 bytes before deciding how to write it in code.
2. Filter the block list by name or by part of a hexadecimal range to find the block a code point belongs to.
3. Read the sample column to see what the block actually contains in practice, remembering that non-printable and unassigned code points are not shown.
4. Copy the character or its entity from the inspector rather than retyping it, since visually identical characters can come from different blocks.

When to use Unicode Character Explorer vs related tools

Reach for it when a character in a document has to be identified before it is replaced or escaped, when a face's script coverage is being discussed and the block names matter, or when a symbol that looks like a hyphen turns out to be something else entirely. The block context is what makes the identification reliable. For the coverage of a specific face the missing glyph detector is the direct test, the Unicode block explorer covers the plane structure behind the blocks, and the character code converter lists every encoding of a character at once.

Privacy & Security

This tool runs entirely in your browser — no data ever leaves your device. There is no server round-trip, no upload, no logging, and no account required. Your input is processed locally using client-side JavaScript and is never stored, transmitted, or accessible to anyone else. When you close the tab, everything disappears.

Frequently asked questions about Unicode Character Explorer