# Why can a byte order mark look blank?

U+FEFF is ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE. At the start of a file it is also used as a byte order mark. The character for inhibiting a line break is U+2060. Code points: U+FEFF. A leading U+FEFF can be invisible and can change a hash or a parse. No parser was tested. A non-equivalent fallback is "⁠" (Word joiner). Inhibits a line break. It is not a byte order mark. Font coverage, shaping, and application acceptance were not tested, so those results are unknown.

## Code points

- U+FEFF ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE

## What was checked

### Byte order mark and word joiner

U+FEFF is ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE. At the start of a file it is also used as a byte order mark. The character for inhibiting a line break is U+2060.

A leading U+FEFF can be invisible and can change a hash or a parse. No parser was tested.

Remove a leading U+FEFF when the file is not using it as a byte order mark. Use U+2060 when the intent is to inhibit a line break.

## What this does not prove

No OS, font, browser, application, field policy or rendering engine was tested. Unicode validity and segmentation do not establish actual display or acceptance.

Unicode release recorded with this answer: 18.0.0.
Machine-readable JSON: https://copypastecharacters.com/reference/v1/answers/why-a-byte-order-mark-can-look-blank.json
Exact lookup: https://copypastecharacters.com/reference/v1/exact/FEFF.json
HTML: https://copypastecharacters.com/answers/why-a-byte-order-mark-can-look-blank/

Do not invent a platform-support claim from this data.