Invisible character disposal since U+FEFF. If you can see the problem, it is not our department.
Paste any text below. Suspect material includes copy from word processors, chat apps, PDFs, and anything a colleague described as "should just work". The squad will identify concealed ordnance and, on your order, render it safe.
| Device | Designation | Class | Field notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| (none) | U+FEFF | CLASS A | Byte order mark. The squad's namesake. Sits at the front of a file and detonates the parser. Planted, in most cases, by a text editor trying to help. |
| (none) | U+200B | CLASS A | Zero width space. Invisible, weightless, and directly responsible for "the strings are equal but the strings are not equal". |
| (none) | U+202E | CLASS A | Right-to-left override. Reverses everything after it. Genuinely used in malware filenames. The squad does not joke about this one. Much. |
| · | U+00A0 | CLASS B | No-break space. Looks exactly like a space. Is not a space. Discovered, typically, at 23:40 on a Friday. |
| " " | U+201C, U+201D | CLASS B | Smart quotes. Inserted by word processors into code samples, where they are extremely stupid. |
| - | U+00AD | CLASS C | Soft hyphen. Appears only when it feels the line needs it. Lives in copied PDF text. Cannot be reasoned with. |
| — | U+2014 | CLASS D | Em dash. Visible, legal in most jurisdictions, and heavily overused in machine-written prose. Detected and reported. Disposal is a matter of editorial policy, not public safety. The squad has opinions but keeps them in the truck. |
Classification reflects blast radius in production. Class A: build fails, nobody knows why. Class B: build succeeds, output wrong, nobody knows why. Class C: intermittent, unreproducible, closed as CANNOT REPRODUCE. Class D: reproducible, visible, argued about in review for forty minutes.