U200B

U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE is a non-printing character in the Unicode standard. Its official name is ZERO WIDTH SPACE, and it belongs to the general category Cf (Format). It has no visible glyph and does not advance the text cursor in most renderers; instead, it marks a position in the text with zero width, allowing certain processing or wrapping behaviors without adding a visible space.

Encoding and representation: The character is identified by the code point U+200B. In UTF-8, it is encoded as the byte sequence E2 80 8B. In UTF-16, it appears as 0x200B. In HTML and many programming contexts, it can be included with an explicit numeric character reference such as ​ or similar escape sequences, depending on the language or environment.

Usage and behavior: The ZERO WIDTH SPACE is used to indicate a potential boundary between characters without introducing visible spacing. It can influence line breaking and word segmentation in text processing, particularly for scripts that do not rely on explicit spaces. It is also employed as an invisible delimiter in data processing, typography, and some user interfaces. Because it is invisible, it can complicate copy-paste, search, indexing, or filtering, and it may be stripped or normalized by software that removes formatting characters.

Related characters: Other zero-width characters in Unicode include U+200C ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER and U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER, which serve different shaping roles in complex scripts. U+2060 WORD JOINER is sometimes discussed in the same family for preserving word boundaries.

See also: zero-width space usage, text rendering, Unicode formatting characters.