U+200B
ZERO WIDTH SPACE
Zero-width space. The most common invisible artifact in copied text.
- Codepoint
- U+200B
- Short
- ZWSP
- Group
zero-width- Class
invisible- Default
- removed
- Replaced by
- removed, no substitute
What it is
The 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.
Where it comes from
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.
When it belongs
In running prose, almost never. That is why this group defaults to removal.
There are exceptions, and TraceFree PRO 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.
What TraceFree PRO does with it
| 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.
How to remove it
In TraceFree PRO, turn on the clipboard watcher and copy the text. On the command line:
tracefree clean --backup document.txt
pbpaste | tracefree clean | pbcopyReport without changing anything — exit code 1 on findings, so it works in CI:
tracefree check -r ./docsHow to write it
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} |
Related characters
Try it on your own text
Paste anything into the browser demo and see what is in it. Same engine as the app, running entirely on your device — nothing is uploaded.
