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JoeHaney-6662 avatar image
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JoeHaney-6662 asked JoeHaney-6662 commented

Why does Chrome randomly inject the ZeroWidthSpace characters into SharePoint rich text fields and IE does not?

When editing rich text fields using the 2016 SharePoint UI, Chrome randomly injects invisible #8203; characters into the field although when making the same identical edits with IE, the invisible characters are not injected.
What causes this behavior and how do we avoid it when using Chrome?

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1 Answer

CaseyYangMSFT-4714 avatar image
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CaseyYangMSFT-4714 answered JoeHaney-6662 commented

Hi @JoeHaney-6662,

Per my research, this character is intended for line break control; it has no width, but its presence between two characters does not prevent increased letter spacing in justification. Here is a workaround to avoid this issue. Paste the code into Brackets, the zero-width spaces are shown up as red dots. Just remove the red dots and check.

For Reference:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18478847/why-is-8203-being-injected-into-my-html
https://www.mazzitorch.com/what-is-8203-why-is-being-injected-into-my-html/
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Hi @JoeHaney-6662,

I'm checking how the things are going on about this issue. Is there any progress on this issue?

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JoeHaney-6662 avatar image JoeHaney-6662 CaseyYangMSFT-4714 ·

Thank you for the info on ZeroWidthSpace Casey!
I discovered this issue when searching for a text string in a page but the search tool could not find the string due to the invisible character being in the middle of the string.
Your solution helps to identify the issue but if the string is copied and pasted into the field again then it may have new ZeroWidthSpace characters injected into different area of the string.
I have not been able to identify the algorithm used by Chrome for it to know where to inject the ZWS character.
I did notice that when building Apps Script / Web Apps for GCP that a built in code sanitizer is used to remove unwanted characters.
MS may wish to look at using a similar technique to get rid of this Chrome malfunction for SharePoint content.
For anyone else wanting to get rid of this problem in the meantime, MS Edge works great!

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