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Soft Hyphens

A soft hyphen (U+00AD, ­) is a type of hyphen used to specify a place in text where a hyphenated break is allowed without forcing a line break in an inconvenient place if the text is re-flowed. Recently I had to deal with the questions of how to handle soft hyphens in a web-based application and quickly discovered that soft hyphens were not as simple a topic as I initially thought. Why should a web developer care one iota about soft hyphens? It is because the use of soft hyphens, while not yet universal, is becoming more common in languages