Reverse Text

Character reversal sounds trivial and is the one place these tools most often go wrong. The naive approach splits a string into its code units, which breaks anything outside the basic multilingual plane: an emoji is stored as two units, and reversing them individually produces a different, usually broken character.

This tool splits by code point instead, so emoji, accented letters and non-Latin scripts survive reversal intact rather than turning into replacement squares.

The other three modes are simpler. Word order splits on whitespace and reverses the sequence, leaving each word readable. Line order flips the document top-to-bottom, which is the practical one. It is how you fix a log file or an export that came out newest-first when you wanted oldest-first. Words within each line reverses each line independently.

One honest caveat about right-to-left text. Arabic and Hebrew are stored in logical order and rendered right-to-left by the display engine, so reversing the characters of Arabic text does not produce readable reversed Arabic — it produces a broken string that happens to render oddly. Character reversal is a Latin-script trick.

The practical case first. You export a chat history and it arrives newest message first — 300 lines in exactly the wrong order for reading.

Paste it, choose Line order, copy. The conversation now reads chronologically. That is the reason this tool earns its place; the rest is mostly for puzzles.

Now the character mode, and a demonstration of why the implementation detail matters. Paste Sara 👋 café and reverse by characters. You get éfac 👋 araS — the waving hand is still a waving hand and the é is still an é.

A tool that splits by code unit instead would turn that emoji into two unpaired halves, which render as replacement squares. If you have ever reversed a string somewhere and watched the emoji break, that is what happened.

Word order is useful for a quick check of a palindrome sentence, and words within each line for reversing a column of names from “Surname Firstname” to “Firstname Surname” — though for that, a regex find and replace gives you more control over punctuation.