U+200C
ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER

Prevents ligature/joining. Required in Arabic, Persian and Indic scripts.

Codepoint

U+200C

Short

ZWNJ

Group

joiner

Class

context-dependent

Default

removed

Replaced by

removed, no substitute

What it is

Two invisible characters that control whether the glyphs around them join: one forces a connection, the other prevents one. They are zero-width, and they carry meaning.

Where it comes from

From emoji, where a sequence of separate pictures is bound into a single one, and from Arabic, Persian, Urdu and the Indic scripts, where joining behaviour is part of spelling.

When it belongs

In Persian, Urdu, Arabic and the Indic scripts this character is spelling. It separates letters that would otherwise join, and removing it produces a misspelled word rather than a cleaner one.

TraceFree PRO detects the surrounding script and holds back. That check is not a courtesy; it is the reason the program can default to removing invisible characters at all.

What TraceFree PRO does with it

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 | pbcopy

Report without changing anything — exit code 1 on findings, so it works in CI:

tracefree check -r ./docs

How 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.

Related characters

• U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER

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.

Try it