I need to have a temporary delimiter, inserted server-side, that cannot possibly exist in content created by user.
The purpose for this is to have prepared content for CSV export, with configurable value delimiter, that will replace this untypeable character client-side, right before the export.
Does such character even exist?
There is no character that cannot possibly exist; however there are many characters (in particular control codes - those lower than decimal 32, excluding cr/lf/tab) that are extremely unlikely to exist in any reasonable text content. This is why escaping is often required in text-based protocols. There is no reserved space of characters that will be escaped in CSV, other than those already used in CSV itself.
Zero-width joiner is a unicode invisible kind of character which exist but do not exist. You can use that! :)
So this web page is rendering with these symbols and they are found throughout this website/application but on no other sites. Can anyone tell me
What this symbol is?
Why it is showing up only in one browser?
That character is U+2028 Line Separator, which is a kind of newline character. Think of it as the Unicode equivalent of HTML’s <br>.
As to why it shows up here: my guess would be that an internal database uses LSEP to not conflict with literal newlines or HTML tags (which might break the database or cause security errors), and either:
The server-side scripts that convert the database to HTML neglected to replace LSEP with <br>
Chrome just breaks standards by displaying LSEP as a printing (visible) character, or
You have a font installed that displays LSEP as a printing character that only Chrome detects. To figure out which font it is, right click on the offending text and click “Inspect”, then switch to the “Computed” tab on the right-hand panel. At the very bottom you should see a section labeled “Rendered Fonts” which will help you locate the offending font.
More information on the line separator, excerpted from the Unicode standard, Chapter 5.8, Newline Guidelines (on p. 12 of this PDF):
Line Separator and Paragraph Separator
A paragraph separator—independent of how it is encoded—is used to indicate a
separation between paragraphs. A line separator indicates where a line break
alone should occur, typically within a paragraph. For example:
This is a paragraph with a line separator at this point,
causing the word “causing” to appear on a different line, but not causing
the typical paragraph indentation, sentence breaking, line spacing, or
change in flush (right, center, or left paragraphs).
For comparison, line separators basically correspond to HTML <BR>, and
paragraph separators to older usage of HTML <P> (modern HTML delimits
paragraphs by enclosing them in <P>...</P>). In word processors, paragraph
separators are usually entered using a keyboard RETURN or ENTER; line
separators are usually entered using a modified RETURN or ENTER, such as
SHIFT-ENTER.
A record separator is used to separate records. For example, when exchanging
tabular data, a common format is to tab-separate the cells and to use a CRLF
at the end of a line of cells. This function is not precisely the same as line
separation, but the same characters are often used.
Traditionally, NLF started out as a line separator (and sometimes record
separator). It is still used as a line separator in simple text editors such as
program editors. As platforms and programs started to handle word processing
with automatic line-wrap, these characters were reinterpreted to stand for
paragraph separators. For example, even such simple programs as the Windows
Notepad program and the Mac SimpleText program interpret their platform’s NLF
as a paragraph separator, not a line separator. Once NLF was reinterpreted to
stand for a paragraph separator, in some cases another control character was
pressed into service as a line separator. For example, vertical tabulation VT
is used in Microsoft Word. However, the choice of character for line separator
is even less standardized than the choice of character for NLF. Many Internet
protocols and a lot of existing text treat NLF as a line separator, so an
implementer cannot simply treat NLF as a paragraph separator in all
circumstances.
Further reading:
Unicode Technical Report #13: Newline Guidelines
General Punctuation (U+2000–U+206F) chart PDF
SE: Why are there so many spaces and line breaks in Unicode?
SO: What is unicode character 2028 (LS / Line Separator) used for?
U+2028 on codepoints.net A misprint here says that U+2028 was added in v. 1.1 of the Unicode standard, which is false — it was added in 1.0
I found that in WordPress the easiest way to remove "L SEP" and "P SEP" characters is to execute this two SQL queries:
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, UNHEX('e280a9'), '')
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, UNHEX('e280a8'), '')
The javascript way (mentioned in some of the answers) can break some things (in my case some modal windows stopped working).
You can use this tool...
http://www.nousphere.net/cleanspecial.php
...to remove all the special characters that Chrome displays.
Steps:
Paste your HTML and Clean using HTML option.
You can manually delete the characters in the editor on this page and see the result.
Paste back your HTML in file and save :)
I recently ran into this issue, tried a number of fixes but ultimately I had to paste the text into VIM and there was an extra space I had to delete. I tried a number of HTML cleaners but none of them worked, VIM was the key!
9999years answers is great.
In case you use Symfony with Twig template I would recommend to check for an empty Twig block. In my case it was an empty Twig block with an invisible char inside.
The LSEP char was only displayed on certain device / browser.
On the other I had a blank space above the header and I could not see any invisible char.
I had to inspect the GET request to see that the value 1f18 was before the open html tag.
Once I removed an empty Twig block it was gone.
hope this can help someone one day ...
My problem was similar, it was "PSEP" or "P SEP". Similar issue, an invisible character in my file.
I replaced \x{2029} with a normal space. Fixed. This problem only appeared on Windows Chrome. Not on my Mac.
I agree with #Kapil Bathija - Basically you can copy & paste your HTML code into http://www.nousphere.net/cleanspecial.php and convert it.
Then it will convert the special characters for you - Just remove the spaces in between the words and you will realize you have to press backspace 2x meaning there is an invalid character that can't be translated.
I had the same issue and it worked just fine afterwards.
You can also copy the text, paste it into a HTML editor such as Coda, remove the linebreak, copy it and paste it back into your site.
Video here: https://www.loom.com/share/501498afa7594d95a18382f1188f33ce
Looks like my client pasted HTML into Wordpress after initially creating it with MS-Word. Even deleting the and visible spaces did not fix the issue. The extended characters became visible in vi/vim.
If you don't have vi/vim available, try highlighting from 2 chars before the LSEP to 2 chars after the LSEP; delete that chunk, and re-type the correct characters.
I found some "funny" characters (e.g. ḓ̵̙͎̖̯̞̜̞̪̠ and •̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩) in social media that takes more than one line. First I think it is the bug of Firefox. I tried this in Gedit and LibreOffice Writer, they are all the same. So, what is this actually? Actually I am asking about the character encoding and rendering.
I tried to find the character in GNOME Character Map, they could not be found.
I tried to check the character code of both of them in unicode (probably UTF-8). It seems they takes more than one character. How come one character is more than one character? This is the result by using Python.
Character ḓ̵̙͎̖̯̞̜̞̪̠
u'\u2022\u0329\u0329\u0329\u0329\u0329\u0329\u0329\u0329\u0329\u0329\u0329\u0329
\u0329\u0329\u0329\u0329\u0329\u0329\u0329\u0329\u0329\u0329'
Character •̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩
u'\u1e13\u0335\u0319\u034e\u0316\u032f\u031e\u031c\u031e\u032a\u0320\u033c\u031e
\u0320\u034e\u033c\u0353\u034b\u036e\u034c\u0346\u0300\u035c\u0345'
U+0329 is COMBINING VERTICAL LINE BELOW. It is a combining character (and so are all the others in there except U+2022 and U+1E13), meaning that it combines with the previous one. What you see here is merely the result of someone stacking way too many combining characters on the same base.
I have a document which has been sloppily authored. It's a dictionary that contains cyrillic characters. Most of the dictionary is manageable, but I'm stuck with one thing I need help with. Words have accented letters in them and they're mostly formatted properly as a letter with a unicode accent (thus forming a single letter). However there are some very peculiar letters that look similar for example to: a;´ (where "a" is any arbitrary cyrillic letter). You'd expect á in its place. However it wouldn't be a problem per se if only this thing could be exported to, say HTML and manipulated in a text editor. The problem is that Word treats this "thing" as a single character/entity and
when exporting it is COMPLETELY omitted
when copied it can only be pasted into Notepad (which translates it into three separate characters), when being pasted into WordPad it just won't appear at all.
when a search is run in Word it won't find the letter, neither the actual character nor the exactly copied/pasted combination.
the letter will disappear when the document is opened in any other software, such as Libre Office
At this point I'm trying to:
understand what this combination is exactly
run a search/replace operation to find and weed out all of those errors
Here's a sample Word file.
Here's a screenshot of the word/letter in question:
which when typed correctly should appear like "скре́пка".
The 'character' appears to be a Word field of type 'eq' (equation). Here is the field with toggled field codes:
If it is a large document you could try to create a VBA routine that removes the fields and replaces them with corresponding characters.
Assuming that #Anonimista’s analysis is correct, as I think it is, you could fix the file by running some search and replace operations in Word, replacing e.g. ^19eq \o(е;´)^21 by е́ (the latter is Cyrillic letter е followed by combining acute accent U+0301). This is dull because you would need to do this for each vowel separately (and for uppercase vowels too). But I cannot find a way to use wildcards in this context; the codes ^19 and ^21 for start and end of field work only when wildcards are not enabled.
We are going to digitize a lot of books. We want to mark place of line break in original book without influencing the flow of digital book. Which invisible Unicode charter can be used to mark some special places in a raw file?
(\n will used to indicate end of paragraph)
This is a sentence
in the original book that
I want to mark line
break places.
What is the proper character to replace *:
This is a sentence * in the original book that * I want to mark line *break places.
Unicode has no concept of a hidden character that represents a line break in some original but does not cause line break in rendering. Unicode encodes plain text data, and its control characters for line breaks have an effect when plain text is rendered.
What matters here is how the files will be used. If they need to be processable with plain text editors, then you need to decide: either the line breaks are replicated in default rendering, or they are omitted when creating the file. You can’t make them invisible. And different text editors, like Notepad and Emacs, may well use different line control conventions; one program’s end of line is another program’s end of paragraph.
If the files will only be processed by programs that you create, then you can use whatever conventions you like. The most logical one is this:
“Line and Paragraph Separator. The Unicode Standard provides two unambiguous characters,
U+2028 line separator and U+2029 paragraph separator, to separate lines and
paragraphs. They are considered the default form of denoting line and paragraph boundaries
in Unicode plain text. A new line is begun after each line separator. A new paragraph
is begun after each paragraph separator. As these characters are separator codes, it is not necessary either to start the first line or paragraph or to end the last line or paragraph with them. Doing so would indicate that there was an empty paragraph or line following. The paragraph separator can be inserted between paragraphs of text. Its use allows the creation of plain text files, which can be laid out on a different line width at the receiving end. The line separator can be used to indicate an unconditional end of line.”
http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.1.0/ch16.pdf (pages 6 and 7 in the PDF)
Beware that U+2028 and U+2029 are generally not understood by text editors. They are suitable for storing data in plain text format. When the text is to be rendered, the rendering software has the option of ignoring the original division into lines and treating U+2028 as equivalent to a space, except if preceded by a hyphen (which poses a problem that cannot be resolved without higher level information: a line that ends with “foo-” and is follod by a line beginning with “bar” could represent the word “foobar” as hyphenated for line breaking, or a hyphenated compound “foo-bar” or, in some cases, the combination “foo- bar”).
Use the line feed character (LF, "\n", 0x0A) and/or maybe carriage return (CR, "\r", 0x0D).
I.e., the regular characters for this purpose.