U+2028
LINE SEPARATOR

Line break that many parsers and editors mishandle.

Codepoint

U+2028

Short

LS

Group

line-separator

Class

invisible

Default

replaced

Replaced by

U+000A

What it is

Unicode's own line and paragraph breaks, separate from the line feed and carriage return inherited from ASCII. They mean the same thing and are handled correctly by far fewer programs.

Where it comes from

From word processors, where it is the shift-return line break within a paragraph, and from anything that exported rich text without normalising its breaks.

It is best known for breaking JavaScript: for years it was a valid line terminator in source code but not inside a JSON string, so a valid JSON document could become invalid JavaScript when embedded directly.

When it belongs

Rarely enough that TraceFree PRO replaces them with an ordinary line feed rather than deleting them: the break was meant, only the encoding of it was unusual.

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+2029 PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR

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