Does Notepad++ show all hidden characters?

Question

In Notepad++ I have set "replace tab with 2 spaces".

When coding in Python I copy-pasted some code from the web and it appeared indented correctly. But running the code resulted in indentation errors, which I solved in the end by removing all "visible" spaces at line beginnings and inserting the same amount of spaces again.

Could it be possible that Scintilla based Notepad++ does not show all special characters, but displays them as spaces? Is there a setting to fix this?

Solution 1

Yes, it does. The way to enable this depends on your version of Notepad++. On newer versions you can use:

Menu View → Show Symbol → *Show All Characters`

or

Menu View → Show Symbol → Show White Space and TAB

(Thanks to bers' comment and bkaid's answers below for these updated locations.)

---

On older versions you can look for:

Menu View → Show all characters

or

Menu View → Show White Space and TAB

Solution 2

In newer versions of Notepad++ (currently 5.9), this option is under:

View->Show Symbol->Show All Characters

or

View->Show Symbol->Show White Space and Tab

Solution 3

Double check your text with the Hex Editor Plug-in. In your case there may have been some control characters which have crept into your text. Usually you'll look at the white-space, and it will say 32 32 32 32, or for Unicode 32 00 32 00 32 00 32 00. You may find the problem this way, providing there isn't masses of code.

Download the Hex Plugin from here; http://sourceforge.net/projects/npp-plugins/files/Hex%20Editor/

Solution 4

Yes, and unfortunately you cannot turn them off, or any other special characters. The options under \View\Show Symbols only turns on or off things like tabs, spaces, EOL, etc. So if you want to read some obscure coding with text in it - you actually need to look elsewhere. I also looked at changing the coding, ASCII is not listed, and that would not make the mess invisible anyway.

Solution 5

For non-printing characters, you can do the following:

• if you could identify the character, where cursor takes 2 arrow keys to move, just select that character.
• do Ctrl-F
• now you can count or replace or even mark all such characters

View more solutions

Comments

[javaPlease42]

Hex Editor Plugin is helpful, thank you! Your link is broken though. Here's an updated link

[DAB]

This should now be the accepted answer for recent versions of N++

[bers]

It's now View->Show Symbol->Show White Space and TAB (v6.8.8).

[ClearBlueSky85]

It depends on the encoding, I don't believe it will show you all the whitespace symbols, for example if you try no-break space U+00A0 or zero-width no-break space U+FEFF

[JaskeyLam]

What about some char like \u0000 , how to display it

[Jester]

Note: NP++ isn't perfect: I'm using some tools to generate files and I somehow have a char that doesn't show, but the arrow keys take two presses to skip over it. :(

[Spikeh]

N.B. NP++ doesn't show BOM characters, though it does have the facility to add / remove them by changing the encoding of the file.

[goofyui]

In one of my file which i am trying to identify the special characters in the hidden empty space, Notepad++ is showing as NUL. What would be that actual symbol?

[RockPaperLz- Mask it or Casket]

This is apparently a serious current limitation in Notepad++

[Uri]

I can't see ‎ characters anyway.

[iman]

@Uri me too, cannot see rlm, lrm, lre, rle, pdf and other bidi control characters