Invisible characters

[YnirPaz]

Having invisible characters in a query (such as "​") will cause no results to show up, resulting in identical looking searches with different results.

[nomeata]

I'm somehow wary of just ignoring them. Maybe what we could do is after pressing search, the entry in the search bar shows them in a visible form, i.e. their escape code ("\123" or whatever the lean syntax is). This way we don't mess with the user input but show the possible mistake.

[YnirPaz]

That sounds great, as long as loogle recognizes the escape code so you can search the replaced version of course.

[nomeata]

Since Loogle uses the lean parser for strings, that should work out of the box. Doing the replacement in Python is a bit trickier.

[nomeata]

OTOH, it probably not worth spending too much thought about this, so if someone opens a PR to the python code that simply strips certain characters form the input right away, I’d probably merge it.