The problem
When viewing the HTML output from my website using the code inspector within Google Chrome, I get the spurious character ​
being injected in my code (snipped screen capture below).
It looks like ​ is a zero width space, but what is causing it?
To check it is not Google Chrome, I tried it in Firefox, and I get red dots, which if hovered, they show a caption of \u200b
(snipped screen capture below).
I don't understand what is going on here because when, instead of visual mode, I view the block in HTML mode within WordPress (click the three dots on top of the block and click 'Edit as HTML') I have the following...
<p>Because it suggests something is being presented as science inaccurately or even deceptively, the term pseudoscience is often considered defamatory (<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" aria-label=" (opens in a new tab)">Hansson, 2008</a>). Accordingly, those termed as practising or advocating pseudoscience often dispute the characterization (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" aria-label=" (opens in a new tab)">“Pseudoscience,” n.d</a>.).</p>
No extra spaces or weird characters
What I have tried so far
- Jetpack's spell checking facility adds code bloat which I had to manually remove so I disabled that and used Microsoft Word for spelling and grammar checking. This may have caused the issue, as suggested in comments, so I tried the suggestion to "put it in Notepad, then copy it again to the clipboard, and paste it on your WordPress", but the spurious injections are still there.
- The same goes when adding a new article with the same information, but the notepad content pasted into the WordPress article content.
- I have checked that it is not a plugin injecting the code by deactivating them one by one.
What is going on? How do I stop these spurious character codes being injected?
In case you need to see the full coding on the live site, go to http://www.whatstheproblem.co.uk/psychology/pseudoscience-in-psychology/ and it is in the last paragraph of the section "What is Pseudoscience?"
== $0
at the end of the line" - that is irrelevant to your current issue. That is just how Chrome's object inspector works. If you select any element on any page you get that and allows you to interact with the element using the console (as the message suggests).