From 4a5fd85a351a061125884ad6505cf086299981ce Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: "Jonathan D.A. Jewell" <6759885+hyperpolymath@users.noreply.github.com>
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2026 14:28:48 +0100
Subject: [PATCH] fix(ci): the invisible-character gate never matched anything

MEASURED 2026-08-27: this gate's pattern caught 0 OF 6 invisible-character test
cases. It has never detected an NBSP, zero-width space, BOM, soft hyphen, bidi
override or word joiner.

ROOT CAUSE: the pattern used UTF-8 BYTE sequences (\xc2\xa0) while grep -P
matches CHARACTERS. Bytes c2 a0 are ONE character U+00A0; \xc2\xa0 asks for TWO
characters, U+00C2 then U+00A0, which is never present.

  grep -P '\xc2\xa0'  ->  miss
  grep -P '\x{a0}'    ->  MATCH

Only \x00 worked, being single-byte in both readings.

FIXED: codepoint escapes; C0 control characters \x01-\x08,\x0B,\x0C,\x0E-\x1F
added (TAB/LF/CR excluded); and grep -a, without which grep skips any NUL-bearing
file as binary.

The C0 range matters: a stray BACKSPACE byte made a workflow unparseable in
developer-ecosystem, so it never ran, and this linter called it clean.

Canonical fix: hyperpolymath/empty-linter#70. 1 file(s) here.
VERIFIED: YAML re-parsed, and the corrected pattern was confirmed to catch a real
NBSP before the change was kept.
---
 .github/workflows/dogfood-gate.yml | 4 ++--
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/.github/workflows/dogfood-gate.yml b/.github/workflows/dogfood-gate.yml
index 22e37f6..8754ed6 100644
--- a/.github/workflows/dogfood-gate.yml
+++ b/.github/workflows/dogfood-gate.yml
@@ -110,7 +110,7 @@ jobs:
           # Checks for: zero-width spaces, zero-width joiners, BOM, soft hyphens,
           # non-breaking spaces, null bytes, and other invisible Unicode in source files.
           set +e
-          PATTERNS='\xc2\xa0|\xe2\x80\x8b|\xe2\x80\x8c|\xe2\x80\x8d|\xef\xbb\xbf|\xc2\xad|\xe2\x80\x8e|\xe2\x80\x8f|\xe2\x80\xaa|\xe2\x80\xab|\xe2\x80\xac|\xe2\x80\xad|\xe2\x80\xae|\x00'
+          PATTERNS='\x00|[\x01-\x08\x0B\x0C\x0E-\x1F]|\x{a0}|\x{ad}|\x{200b}|\x{200c}|\x{200d}|\x{200e}|\x{200f}|\x{202a}|\x{202b}|\x{202c}|\x{202d}|\x{202e}|\x{2060}|\x{feff}'
           find "$GITHUB_WORKSPACE" \
             -not -path '*/.git/*' -not -path '*/node_modules/*' \
             -not -path '*/.deno/*' -not -path '*/target/*' \
@@ -121,7 +121,7 @@ jobs:
               -o -name '*.yml' -o -name '*.yaml' -o -name '*.md' -o -name '*.adoc' \
               -o -name '*.idr' -o -name '*.zig' -o -name '*.v' -o -name '*.jl' \
               -o -name '*.gleam' -o -name '*.hs' -o -name '*.ml' -o -name '*.sh' \) \
-            -exec grep -Prl "$PATTERNS" {} \; > /tmp/empty-lint-results.txt 2>/dev/null
+            -exec grep -aPrl "$PATTERNS" {} \; > /tmp/empty-lint-results.txt 2>/dev/null
           EL_EXIT=$?
           set -e