In our repos, we have some basic stuff like ruff that runs, and that includes a hard error on any Unicode characters. We mostly did this after some un-fun times when byte order marks somehow ended up in a file and it made something fail.

I have considered allowing a short list that does not include emojis, joining characters, and so on - basically just currency symbols, accent marks, and everything else you'd find in CP-1521 but never got around to it.

> There are rather few legitimate uses of some zero-width characters, like ZWJ in emoji composition.

Emojis are another abomination that should be removed from Unicode. If you want pictures, use a gif.

Arguably them being in Unicode is an accessibility issue, unless we thought to standardize GIF names, and then that already sounds a lot like Unicode.

How is it an accessibility issue? HTML allows things like little gif files. I've done this myself when I wrote text that contained Egyptian hieroglyphs. It works just fine!

I mean if you don't have sight.

Then use words. Or tooltips (HTML supports that). I use tooltips on my web pages to support accessibility for screen readers. Unicode should not be attempting to badly reinvent HTML.

( ꏿ ﹏ ꏿ ; )

I think there’s debate (which I don’t want to participate in) over whether or not invisible characters have their uses in Unicode. But I hope we can all agree that invisible characters have no business in code, and banishing them is reasonable.

Automatic escaping sounds nice until you need to grep or diff across repos and get buried in opaque escapes that turn ordinary review into unreadable junk. Once that lands in a repo, even routine deps updates can turn into edge-case mismatch roulette.

Lint zero-width chars, sure. But if the actual sink is runtime string injection, banning eval is only half a fix because Function and friends still get you to the same bad place while the linter congratulates itself.