Reminder: websites contain weird characters

Copying contents from the web often copies weird characters, like the invisible character U+FEFF or “Zero Width No-Break Space”.

Code editors like VS Code might highlight those characters depending on your config, but other websites don’t. In my case I copied a secret for my CI pipeline including the invisible character.

An easy workaround for this on the mac: Spotlight removes some of these characters. A simple cmd+space, cmd+v, cmd+a, cmd+c and esc cleans the copied text.

And suddenly the inserted password is correct!