Reverse Text

What each mode does to the same text

Reverse words keeps punctuation attached to its word, so the comma stays with Hello and the exclamation mark with world. It also keeps every run of whitespace in its place, including the double space and the line break in the second example, which is why words migrate across lines: the whole text is reversed as one sequence, not each line separately.

How characters are reversed

Reverse characters works on Unicode code points rather than on bytes or UTF-16 units, so a single emoji such as 😀 survives intact and 'hello 😀 world' becomes 'dlrow 😀 olleh'. Sequences built from several code points are not kept together: a thumbs-up with a skin tone splits into the modifier followed by the plain thumbs-up, a flag turns into its two letter symbols in the wrong order, and a letter typed as a base letter plus a separate combining accent ends up with the accent attached to the neighbouring character. Accented letters typed as a single key are unaffected.

Checking palindromes

Reverse characters is a quick palindrome test for single words: 'racecar' reversed reads 'racecar'. For phrases, spaces and punctuation stay where they fall, so 'Never odd or even' becomes 'neve ro ddo reveN' rather than an identical string. Remove the spaces and punctuation first, or compare the letters only, before deciding a phrase is a palindrome.

Modes this tool does not offer

• Reversing the letters inside each word while keeping word order ('olleH dlrow'). Reverse the characters, then reverse the words, and you get it: the two operations combined produce exactly that.
• Reversing words within each line separately. Because whitespace runs are preserved as a single sequence, words cross line boundaries; process one line at a time if that matters.
• Mirror or upside-down fonts. The output uses the same characters you typed, in a different order, so it pastes anywhere.

Everyday uses

• Reverse lines turns a chronological list such as a changelog or chat export into newest-first order without retyping.
• Reverse words produces reversed phrase puzzles and tests whether a sentence still scans backwards.
• Reverse characters decodes text that was deliberately written backwards and creates mirror-writing exercises for printing and flipping.
• Programmers can sanity-check string reversal output from their own code against a known-good result.