Spot the difference

Have a look at Value A and Value B on page 1. They’re the same, right?

“They are definitely the same.”

Nope, they’re not.

“Okay, I’m guessing there’s an extra space at the end of one of them then.”

You’re still wrong.

Page 2 reveals that despite featuring the exact same words, “Hello world”, and the same character length — there’s still a difference.

It’s an invisible difference.

The space that separates “Hello” and “world” in each is not an identical Unicode character. There are over 20 types of spaces that mainly differ by width.

You’re most likely to encounter this problem if you copy text from the web and paste it into Excel. Only today, I had an issue with a few XLOOKUPs precisely because of this, so it’s worth being aware of.