Zero-width space. The most common invisible artifact in copied text.
zero-widthinvisibleThe zero-width space is the most common invisible artifact in copied text, and the one most people mean when they say a document has hidden characters in it. It marks a place where a line may break, and it draws nothing at all.
Content systems insert it into long words and addresses so they wrap instead of overflowing. Word processors leave it behind. Text produced by a language model carries it through from the tokenizer. And because it is the best-known invisible character, it is also the first one reached for by anyone marking a document.
In running prose, almost never. That is why this group defaults to removal.
There are exceptions, and TraceFree knows them: a byte order mark at the very start of a file is a legitimate encoding marker, and a few of these codepoints are ordinary parts of the scripts they belong to.
| Preset | Action |
|---|---|
conservative | removed |
default | removed |
report-only | asked about |
strict | removed |
Context guards can only ever make a cleanup gentler, never sharper. A rule saying “always remove” does not override them.
In TraceFree, turn on the clipboard watcher and copy the text — the finding appears with a before-and-after comparison of the affected lines. For files, a watched folder does the same, keeping a backup copy alongside.
This page never prints the character itself, only ways of writing it. A page about invisible characters that contained invisible characters would be unreviewable — and that is the problem the program exists to solve.
| Notation | Value |
|---|---|
| Unicode | U+200B |
| Rust | \u{200B} |
| JavaScript, Python | \u200B |
| HTML | ​ ​ |
| Regex (PCRE, Rust) | \x{200B} |