zufuliu
Character AD / 173
AD (=173) is a "soft hyphen" and doesn't display in Notepad4 (I tried changing the Font and looking at settings) though in Winmerge it is shown as a hyphen. Some OCR programs produce it when they meet a dash including in inappropriate places such as in "1-2 cm", which in Notepad4 comes out as "12 cm".
As a technical editor it would be good if Notepad could display it, and perhaps other similar characters could be thought of.
d
Looks it's an invisible character.
https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2002/02279-muller.htm
SHY is rendered invisibly and has no width, except at a line break. The rendering of the soft hyphen depends on the script. For the Latin script it is rendered as a hyphen, however, some languages require a change in spelling surrounding an optional hyphen, if it occurs at a line break. For example in Swedish the word “tuggummi” changes to “tugg-gummi” when hyphenated.
Change rendering technology to legacy GDI, rendered it as hyphen.
Or it could be added to Edit -> Insert -> Unicode Control Character, so when View -> Unicode Control Character is checked, it could be rendered as a boxed-blob.
Something would be good, and I see NP++ also renders it just as winmerge does. Ideally it should appear as a hyphen rather than a code but if possible in such a way that it's indicated as not a normal hyphen, for example it could be in red like the other invisible symbols.
Perhaps also, when you right-click a selection there could also be a menu item "Copy Character Values" that when chosen copies to the clipboard a list of the characters and their hex/decimal values of the selection in some fashion, as this can often be useful for troubleshooting, and would help in this instance (a workaround is to use Ctrl-Shift-E url encoder)
NP++ also renders it just as winmerge does.
Change rendering technology to legacy GDI will render it as hyphen.
Windows 11 Notepad, Edge, Chrome, etc. render it as invisible.
the clipboard a list of the characters and their hex/decimal values of the selection in some fashion
You can use menu "Edit -> Special -> Char to Hex" to get character hex value.
Commit 42f9f27481ab2ade87057d5e4c210f33e5e20033 added U++00AD as Unicode control character, rendered as SHY when "View > Unicode Control Character" is checked.