The Unicode That Wouldn’t Die: My 2-Day Fight with Special Characters and Copy/Paste Hell

The Backstory I recently ran into an incredibly frustrating issue while working on a .NET 8 app. I was generating strings full of special Unicode characters — we're talking symbols, scripts, arrows, math, and mystery boxes: yաӊÊ❉ė◁Δ▁ҥοӧ΢Ӝ✾✼փΜ÷α➌◎F❿ÓĘԱ˅'Ѯ❏˭Eխ✠❾5ҫ▒ê➚~Á➆◧▎ɛÅӇѴ՟◄Áβ▒... Parsing worked perfectly inside my app. But the moment I wrote this string to a file, opened the file, copied the text back into the app, and tried to parse it again —

Mar 24, 2025 - 18:39

The Unicode That Wouldn’t Die: My 2-Day Fight with Special Characters and Copy/Paste Hell

The Backstory
I recently ran into an incredibly frustrating issue while working on a .NET 8 app. I was generating strings full of special Unicode characters — we're talking symbols, scripts, arrows, math, and mystery boxes:
yաӊÊ❉ė◁Δ▁ҥοӧ΢Ӝ✾✼փΜ÷α➌◎F❿ÓĘԱ˅'Ѯ❏˭Eխ✠❾5ҫ▒ê➚~Á➆◧▎ɛÅӇѴ՟◄Áβ▒...
Parsing worked perfectly inside my app.
But the moment I wrote this string to a file, opened the file, copied the text back into the app, and tried to parse it again —