I was pushing some old data through an API at work when I received a weird error message. The API coughed up a hairball. It responded that I had u200b at position 154, and if I needed that character, I’d have to encode it. But I looked at position 154 and it was a number. Nothing weird. Some APIs render this problem character as u+200b. So what’s u200b, why does a problematic invisible character exist, and how do you clean it up?
U200b is a Unicode non-printing space character. It’s meant to assist typographers in creating page layouts, and it’s extremely useful in certain languages that don’t use the Roman alphabet. But many of us who use the Roman alphabet may go a lifetime without needing it.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
