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.htaccesscharacterspecial-characters

What kind of sign is "‎" and what is it used for

What kind of sign is "‎" and what is it used for (note there is a invisible sign there)?

I have searched through all my documents and found a lot of them. They messed upp my htaccess file. I think I got them when I copied webadresses from google to redirect. So maybe a warning searching through your documents for this one also :)

Solution

  • It is U+200E LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK. (A quick way to check out such things is to copy a string containing the character and paste it in the writing area in my Full Unicode input utility, then click on the “Show U+” button there, and use Fileformat.Info character search to check out the name and other properties of the character, on the basis of its U+... number.)

    The LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK sets the writing direction of directionally neutral characters. It does not affect e.g. English or Arabic words, but it may mess up text that contains parentheses for example – though for text in English, there should be no confusion in this sense.

    But, of course, when text is processed programmatically, as when a web server processes a .htaccess file, they are character data and make a big difference.