Zero Width Space

Posted on Sunday September 2011

Although it sounds like a plot device from StarGate it’s actually a means of indicating a word boundary in computerised typesetting.

It's also a neat way of causing me to tear my hair out and swear a lot. I mean a lot.

I recently was building some nested master pages in ASP.NET. Somehow I had managed to get one of these magical little characters into my source. I’m not sure how as all I had was the most simple of pages.

It looked like this: 


    <%@ Master Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Site.Master" 
        AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="NestedMasterPage1.master.cs" 
        Inherits="WebApplication1.NestedMasterPage1" %>

    <asp:Content ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server">
        spot the typo
    </asp:Content>

You can immediately see the problem, right?

Run the app and get a beautiful YSOD:

Alt text

15 minutes later and I am near to tears. But then… Open the file in a binary editor.

Alt text

OD OA are the usual /r/n characters. The E2 80 8B at the end is the culprit. Delete these and all is well.

Where did they come from? I don't know. Where did they go? To silicon heaven.

What's worse is I have seen this bug, or one very like it, many years ago. The guy sitting next to me had similar issues (he swore a lot), and eventually he wrote a small app to inspect the hex values of the source (it was back in Visual InterDev days, not sure if there was a binary editor built in back then, but anyways).

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