Category:CS1 errors: invisible characters

This is a tracking category. It is used to build and maintain a list or lists of pages—primarily for the sake of the lists themselves and their use in article and category maintenance. It is not part of the encyclopedia's categorization scheme. More information: This category is hidden on its member pages—unless the corresponding user preference (Appearance → Show hidden categories) is set. These categories are used to track, build and organize lists of pages needing "attention en masse" (for example, pages using deprecated syntax), or that may need to be edited at someone's earliest convenience. These categories also serve to aggregate members of several lists or subcategories into a larger, more efficient list (discriminated by classifications). Typically, tracking categories are automatically populated by templates invoked in pages or by the MediaWiki software (see Special:TrackingCategories for an overview of the latter).

Administrators: Please do not delete this category as empty! This category may be empty occasionally or even most of the time.

This is a tracking category for CS1 and CS2 templates that have parameter values that contain invisible or non-printable characters.

Many (although not all) errors in the category can automatically be fixed by clicking here to activate User:Citation bot.

Help desk

<char> character in |<param>= at position n

This error is reported for citations with parameter values that contain invisible or non-printable characters known as control characters; the error includes the position at which the character can be found. Module:Citation/CS1 detects parameter values that contain any of these characters:

• non-breaking space, U+00A0
• soft hyphen, U+00AD
• replacement character, U+FFFD
• hair space, U+200A
• zero-width space, U+200B
• zero-width joiner, U+200D (note that these are permitted as part of emoji modifiers; see note below)
• horizontal tab, U+0009 (HT)
• line feed, U+0010 (LF)
• carriage return, U+0013 (CR)
• delete character, U+007F (DEL)
• C0 control, U+0000–U+001F (NULL–US)
• C1 control, U+0080–U+009F (XXX–APC)

To resolve invisible-character errors, remove or replace the identified character. Most intentional white-space characters should be replaced with a normal space character (i.e. press your keyboard's space bar). See MOS:NBSP for guidance on insertion of intentional non-breaking spaces.

Because these characters are mostly invisible, the error message identifies the character's position in the parameter value counted from the left. Space characters between the assignment operator (the '=' sign) and the parameter value are not counted. If you move through the citation with the arrow keys then the cursor may stand still once at an invisible character, which can be removed with Delete or ← Backspace. If you copy-paste a string to the "Characters" field at https://r12a.github.io/app-conversion/ and click "View in UniView" then the position and name of all characters is shown.

Zero-width joiner characters (U+200D) are used as a valid part of emoji modification (for example, adding a skull emoji to a flag emoji to create a pirate flag emoji). When new modifiers are added to the emoji character set, which happens one or two times per year, those modifiers need to be added to the Citation Style 1 "Configuration" module. Editors can request this addition at Help talk:Citation Style 1.

<name> stripmarker in |<param>= at position n

Strip markers are special sequences of characters that MediaWiki inserts as a place-holder for certain XML-like tags. These tags include <gallery>...</gallery>, <math>...</math>, <nowiki>...</nowiki>, <pre>...</pre>, and <ref>...</ref>. The strip markers are replaced with content before the final page rendering. The module ignores math and nowiki strip markers.

To resolve strip marker errors, remove or replace the identified tag. The error message identifies the strip marker's position in the parameter value counted from the left. Space characters between the assignment operator (the '=' sign) and the parameter value are not counted when calculating the position.

Strip marker errors can also be caused by unsupported additional text or templates in parameter values—for example, {{ISBN}} in |title=. Resolve the problem by moving the extraneous text outside the citation template, or by removing the extraneous text or template markup, as appropriate.

Pages with this error are automatically placed in Category:CS1 errors: invisible characters.^[a]