200b

It seems there are invisible characters floating around out there on the internet that cannot be detected by a person using any popular computer programs. Zero-Width Characters by Zach Aysan gives us a hint, but he doesn't tell us the whole story. He gives us two sample lines of text that look the same but he claims are actually different.

Copy one line and then search for it using Ctrl-F and you find both lines. Look at the source using the Chrome browser and the lines look the same. Save the page and look at it using the Linux text editor xed and again, both lines look the same.

Invisible Text

Only when I opened the saved web page with vi (an old school text editor) was I able to see the 'invisible' characters: a less-than-sign (<) followed by 200b followed by a greater-than-sign (>). What's even weirder is that vi highlighted this sequence with blue.

Via Monday Evening