u+200b.
Who made that shit? and whhhyyyyy?
I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out why the code file, a mac using co-worker sent me, does not compile.
Intlij did not help, np++ did not help, textmate did not help!

Only hex editing the file worked!

kill it with fire!

"The zero-width space [...] is a non-printing character used fin computerized typesetting to indicate word boundaries to text processing systems when using scripts that do not use explicit spacing" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So a workaround?

@ScriptCoded Yes. google took me there.
Any reason why a (fucking) normal (fucking) space would not work? What dumbass usecase other then annoying the world of programming (and more important, me!) was the this fuckery good for???

Whitespace Matters

@halfflat wat? The Japanese have normal spaces, same as the whole world!
"machine parsing space"! without normal spaces is just fukin idiotic! srsly!

use a normal space ffs!

@Demolishun I agree. but that shit ain't white - (danger of sounding racist here).

@magicMirror Ooh, is there git commit tied to it? You might have seen the moment someone pasted code from a website like SO and it had some messed up whitespace chars in there.

@Demolishun no. The other dev sent me a small poc code he wrote, zipped on his mac. On his laptop the thing compiled. on my laptop - not so much.

@halfflat and yes, the japanese can use spaces, or not for all I care. No reason to inflict this sheer idiocy on the rest of the literate world.