A JBS issue summary becomes a pull request title and, eventually, the first line of a commit message. Both the title and the message have an important role in the workflow. If the summary contains characters or character combinations that might be displayed differently than they appear in text, it might cause problems.


One example is whitespace. When rendered in UI, such as GitLab, a run of whitespace is compressed down to a single whitespace character. Not only does it look like a single whitespace, it really is a single whitespace. Another example is a non-printable character, such as zero-width space. When present, it breaks search. One more example is ellipsis, which might be sometimes confused with three consecutive dots. Whatever the case is, it's hard to troubleshoot.


Bots could detect suspicious characters and direct user's attention to them, so that the user could fix the problem where possible. Sadly, in some cases, having such characters is unavoidable.