The word joiner (WJ) is a format
character
Character or Characters may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Literature
* ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk
* ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...
in
Unicode used to indicate that
word separation should not occur at a position, when using scripts such as
Arabic that do not use explicit
spacing. It is encoded since Unicode version 3.2 (released in 2002) as .
The word joiner does not produce any space and prohibits a
line break at its position. Thus, it is a nonbreaking space with zero width.
The word joiner replaces the ''zero-width no-break space'' (''ZWNBSP'', U+FEFF), as a usage of the no-break space of zero width. Character U+FEFF is intended for use as a
byte order mark (BOM) at the start of a file. However, if encountered elsewhere, it should, according to Unicode, be treated as a zero-width
no-break space. The deliberate use of U+FEFF for this purpose is deprecated as of Unicode 3.2, with the word joiner strongly preferred.
[FAQ - UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 & BOM, ''”What should I do with U+FEFF in the middle of a file?“'']
See also
*
Byte order mark, which uses (ZWNBSP) character
*
Zero-width space
*
Zero-width joiner
References
Control characters
Unicode formatting code points
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