Invisible Unicode character corrupted a security patch, its review, and the fix review
A developer working on the open-source project safari-mcp received an automated security pull request intended to fix a JavaScript string-injection vulnerability involving Unicode characters U+2028 and U+2029. The patch inadvertently embedded these raw characters inside regex literals, causing a SyntaxError that prevented the entire server from starting. Because most terminals silently render U+2028 as a space, the bug was invisible during normal code review and was only detected by inspecting raw byte output using Python's repr(). The same invisible character then contaminated the developer's own REQUEST_CHANGES review and later the approval review, both of which were meant to demonstrate the correct fix. The experience led the developer to adopt a rule of always verifying published text at the byte level rather than trusting how editors or terminals render Unicode.
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