How to display hidden characters by default ZERO WIDTH SPACE ie 8203

Question

I just lost part of my weekend because of this     joker - zero width space  I just used some snippets from google groups and didn t recognize that there are doubled characters  because Idea  11  didn t show them  which was causing problems with parsing config file of my app    I discovered it accidentally in vi   Is there any way to display such things in IntelliJ  or some other way to examine files  without using external editors   IntelliJ 11   Mac OS 10 7  edit - sample  These two lines looks identical  in browser and also in Idea  You can see in page s code that in first - commented line there is hidden zero width space between mysql    and localhost  which causes problems  Of course if you expect that  joker   you can try to use search and replace it  however nobody expects the sign that should not be there  especially if he cannot see it in any way     db default url  jdbc mysql    localhost play-fullcalendar   db default url  jdbc mysql   localhost play-fullcalendar

User · Accepted Answer

Not sure what you meant  but you can permanently turn showing whitespaces on and off in Settings - gt  Editor - gt  General - gt  Appearance - gt  Show whitespaces   Also  you can set it for a current file only in View - gt  Active Editor - gt  Show WhiteSpaces   Edit   Had some free time since it looks like a popular issue  I had written a plugin to inspect the code for such abnormalities  It is called Zero Width Characters locator and you re welcome to give it a try

User · Answer

A very simple solution is to search your file s  for non-ascii characters using a regular expression  This will nicely highlight all the spots where they are found with a border   Search for    x00- x7F  and check the box for Regex   The result will look like this  in dark mode

[intellij-idea] How to display hidden characters by default (ZERO WIDTH SPACE ie. &#8203)

Examples related to intellij-idea

Examples related to phpstorm

Examples related to whitespace