Show other invisible characters with renderWhitespace option

[sijad]

just in case atom also render CR, EOL characters
0-31 and 127 ASCII code are non-printable characters
also #2085 is related

[Platzer]

Is it possible to render not printable characters?

[jaredatron]

I just waisted 20m debugging a url problem because I had a Unicode Decimal Code ‭ preceding my absolute url causing it to be treated as a relative path.

Please allow us to enable rendering of these weird characters that no programmer ever wants in their code.

[perrog]

+all other non-graphical code points.

Example:
Create a source-code file containing U+200B (ZERO WIDTH SPACE) format character, and open it in VSCode.
PS> [char]0x200B | Out-File .\zero_width_space.ps1 -Encoding utf8
File content in bytes:
PS > [io.file]::ReadAllBytes('.\zero_width_space.ps1')
239 187 191 226 128 139 13 10

Result:
VSCode does not display anything when opening the file, even when "editor.renderWhitespace"="all"
The first 239 187 191 (ZERO WIDTH NON-BREAKING SPACE) is intepreted as BOM.
The rest 226 128 139 13 10 (ZERO WIDTH SPACE) +(CR) + (LF) is source code text.

Background.
I this case, the second code point (ZERO WIDTH SPACE) is a syntax error for the particular source-code.

The source-code contains syntax error => important to be able to show invisible characters in a code editor.

In general, it may be useful to have an option to display Unicode-formatting characters in text file, if used explicitly in doc comments.

Formatting characters may also be accidental garbage when pasting text from a webbrowser.

Even the BOM-character could be shown as invisible character for full transparency.

[alexdima]

This has been implemented in the meantime --> https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_63#_unicode-highlighting

[Fydon]

@alexdima I'm on 1.75.0-insider with editor.renderWhitespace set to all. I don't see CR and LF characters rendered in the editor. How do I show these?

[alexdima]

@Fydon That is tracked in #12223