Post Editor Automatically Deletes Soft Hyphens

[Chriki]

Wordpress 4.2.2 automatically deletes ​soft hyphens from my posts. This happens either:

• when I switch between the visual and text views of the editor, or
• when I save the post.

I have tried to add soft hyphens in various ways:

• added using the “Select custom character” pop-up window from the visual view
• added by copy and paste into both the visual and text views
• added in the text view using the ­ HTML entity

In all cases the soft hyphens were automatically deleted by the editor. This shouldn’t happen since soft hyphens are required for ​suggesting line break opportunities for web browsers when automatic hyphenation is in use.

[azaozz]

Hi Chriki, welcome to the WordPress core trac.

Adding soft hyphen (U+00AD) characters in the editor is working properly here. They are normally invisible. From Wikipedia:

(The U+00AD character) serves as an invisible marker used to specify a place in text where a hyphenated break is allowed.
It becomes visible only after word wrapping at the end of a line.

In WordPress TinyMCE is set to convert almost all HTML entities to characters, so even if you paste ­ in the Text editor, it will be converted to the U+00AD character after switching to the Visual editor. There's no good way to see these characters other than to preview the content and resize the window until a word is wrapped.

You can also check if they exist from the browser console:

tinymce.activeEditor.getContent().replace(/\u00ad/g, '$shy;');

TinyMCE has a menu item to (temporarily) show invisible characters, but the menu is not used in WordPress by default. A plugin can be installed to enable it. Perhaps we can add a keyboard shortcut for that (although it seems a bit buggy)?

[Chriki]

Thank you, azaozz, for the quick and thorough reply!

You are absolutely right, I should have researched this better. My browser simply ignores the soft hyphens for some reason and I blamed the Wordpress editor … I’m sorry.

The soft hyphens are still there (more than needed by now). So, a way of showing non-printing (i.e., both invisible and whitespace) characters would indeed have been quite helpful here – something like the “Non-printing characters” toolbar button in LibreOffice Writer. But that’s probably a different ticket.

This ticket can be closed, I guess. Should I do this myself?

Thanks again!