Would it be possible to create "invisible ascii" characters as part of unicode?<p>Such characters would be useful for hiding URL text, for example.
There's something similar, Unicode tags <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags_(Unicode_block)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags_(Unicode_block)</a>:<p><i>Tags is a Unicode block containing formatting tag characters. The block is designed to mirror ASCII. It was originally intended for language tags, but has now been repurposed as emoji modifiers, specifically for region flags.</i>
Let's try something using some text from a scratchpad of notes I keep in VSCODE.<p><pre><code> find and replace:
; to ""
> to >"
< to "<
>"
to
>
"< to <
get rid of the " at the start of the document and at the end too
then use format document with > XML
- unit separator
- record separator
- group separator
- file separator</code></pre>
I encoded ascii using morse code with a dot becoming a space and a dash becoming a tab. I wrapped the whole thing with a trivial C program to encode/decode.<p>The end result was "Hello, World" in C but completely invisible. That made it possible to include code that no-one can see but will still be compiled.