An option to make control characters visible?

[RexButler]

Currently I am having the following problem: I often use Ctrl-Shift-S to Save All. However, sometimes I inadvertently do Ctrl-Shift-A, entering a hidden character, and not notice until I get a weird error message. For example, if I'm coding in Javascript, I'll get an "Invalid Character" error.

Is there a way to make all special characters visible?

Thanks

[ak47wong]

The character entered by Ctrl+Shift+A (SOH or ^1) should already be visible, either as a filled or unfilled box or a boxed question mark.

If this particular keystroke is causing you grief, you can reassign it:

1. Click Configure > Preferences > Keyboard.
2. Under Categories, click File.
3. If you want to assign Ctrl+Shift+A to the same command as Ctrl+Shift+S, under Commands, click FileSaveAll. If you want it to do (almost) nothing, under Commands, click FileStatistics.
4. Under Press new shortcut key, press Ctrl+Shift+A.
5. Click Assign.

[homepagestore]

I had a line of text that got invalid characters in it. I found out about the invalid characters when I tried to save a file using those characters as the name and Windows complained about the filename containing invalid characters.

I open TextPad and paste the string so I can locate the invalid characters. The invalid characters were not visible in TextPad either. The only way I could find them was the use the arrow key to advance one character at a time. When I came to an invalid character, the visible location of the cursor did not advance. If I press the Backspace key, the invalid character would be deleted.

If there a way to turn on the display of all characters?

[AmigoJack]

• Invalid characters:
  
  you most likely had one ZERO WIDTH SPACE or ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER (see second table), which, due to its nature, does not have any width and thus cannot be seen.
• Filename:
  
  that was most likely not Windows in general, but only its Explorer. Strictly speaking the file system NTFS allows such characters (even newlines), but most applications are neither prepared to deal with that, nor with a BOM.
• Visibility in TextPad:
  
  not directly. But you can paste your clipboard content and then save the file in one of the Unicode encodings, then close it, then starting the "Open file" dialog and reselect the just saved file AND as "Mode" select "Binary". Now you see the file content in a hexadecimal view, where you can see the bytes for each character. However, the interpretation needs basic understanding about the encoding (i.e. UTF-8: 1 to 4 bytes per character; UTF-16: 2 or 4 bytes per character; UTF-32: always 4 bytes per character...). This is more or less the only way to "see" such characters.