U+2029
PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR

Paragraph break that many parsers and editors mishandle.

Codepoint

U+2029

Short

PS

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 and page-layout software, and from anything that converted rich text to plain text without normalising the breaks.

When it belongs

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

What TraceFree 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, 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.

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+2028 LINE SEPARATOR