[christiangenco]

My high school english classes would upload any papers students wrote to a site that would check for plagiarism. I figured out that if I inserted random zero-width no-break spaces in the middle of words my plagiarism score would drop to zero.

Presumably the plagiarism system was just looking for exact matches of long substrings.

[benj111]

Somewhere someone is adding long lines of BOMs just so if someone else adds long lines of BOMs it gets flagged as plagiarism.

I hope it returns the copied string.

String "" is plagiarised

[donatj]

Interesting. You could presumably also swap out characters for homoglyphs at random.

[frabjoused]

The original creator of the first zero width space had to be evil.

[throwaway290]

It has uses in typesetting, e.g. for allowing a word to be broken.

[Doxin]

So what's the point of a zero width nonbreaking space then? seeing as that also exists.

[throwaway290]

Used e.g. to avoid awkward linebreaks

[Doxin]

You can surely also use no character at all to replace a zero width nonbreaking space for that use case though, or am I missing some subtlety here?

[mr337]

Wow, this is pretty nifty and I would, nor would the program authors thing of that use case :D