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 any parser that expects the first byte to be something else, which is most of them outside the ones written to look for it. 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.