
The useful character that is none - Abimelex
https://twivorite.com/
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yardshop
It worked in Firefox Developer Edition.

Then I was able to paste it into SublimeText. I pasted it several times.
SublimeText says the line is 6 characters long, but the cursor is still at the
left edge! Then I copied that line, and my clipboard viewer shows 14 bytes for
the Unicode entry, 12 bytes for the 6 characters and a two null bytes. As
expected, the characters survive being saved with Trim Trailing Whitespace
enabled. Reopening the file with a single-byte encoding (I tried Windows 1252)
showed the characters. My hex viewer shows 6 occurrences of E2 80 8B.

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crehn
Tiny nitpick: U+200B is a _Unicode_ character, not necessarily UTF-8.

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ygra
\u{200B} also has nothing to do with UTF-8. But I guess the inherent
complexity with Unicode and its encodings means that most people will not care
to understand how everything relates to each other.

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ChristianBundy
My understanding: Unicode is the dictionary maps codepoints (e.g. `0x200B`)
with characters (e.g. ` `) and UTF-8 is a way to encode those codepoints with
1-4 bytes per character. Is that right?

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crehn
Pretty much. The charset (e.g. Unicode) just maps numbers to characters, and
the encoding (e.g. UTF-8) translates sequences of numbers to bytes (and vice
versa).

Unfortunately, there's a lot of blurred lines and loose usage of terminology
due to misunderstandings and historical baggage (e.g. ambiguous usage of
"charset", Microsoft's usage of "Unicode", "ASCII" used to refer to both
charset and encoding, etc.) which contributes to the confusion.

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Narushia
I would suggest using the word joiner character (U+2060) for this purpose. If
you use a zero-width space in a hashtag and it ends up at the end of the line,
the characters after the ZWS will get broken to the next line. When you use
word joiner, this will not happen and the whole word will stay connected.
Example: [https://imgur.com/0DposDa](https://imgur.com/0DposDa)

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kalak
I'm not sure why, but doing a Google search for that character gives
interesting results

~~~
kgwxd
DDG gave me nothing but the Wikipedia snippet for "Zero-width space"

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Lowkeyloki
It's worth noting that last time I tried, you can't use this character to
tweet a seemingly blank tweet. Twitter correctly disallows this as it would if
you tried to tweet a normal space character and nothing else. However, there
are plenty of other non-printing unicode characters that you can still use to
tweet a seemingly empty tweet.

Hacker News also disallows this in its comments. YMMV with other non-printing
characters.

~~~
duxup
I wonder what the underlying reasons for the differences is from text field to
text field.

~~~
yardshop
You can actually enter the character in this textbox, but they probably strip
it out when posting.

~~~
Lowkeyloki
It's definitely done on the backend with Twitter. Probably HN, too.

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saagarjha
> The button is tested in chrome browsers, if you use another browser it may
> not work for you.

It doesn’t work in Safari on iOS, FWIW.

~~~
Abimelex
thanks, I try to fix that soon

~~~
saagarjha
Thanks for looking into this!

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duxup
If only Rudy Giuliani had known about this he might not have had someone
"invade" his text on Twitter.

