The point of Soft Hyphens (­) in HTML code is to allow long numbers to be continued on one or more lines when the screen-width is less than the string length.
For many years Firefox has not allowed Copy/Paste to omit the actual hyphens in the resulting string on the Clipboard. Opera and IE work as expected (no actual hyphens).
Here is a small HTML file to demonstrate the problem. Copy and Paste this code into a text file called, say, hyphen.htm and then open it with Firefox. See what happens.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Testing Soft Hyphens</title>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=windows-1252″ />
<style>
h1 {text-align: center}
p {padding-left: 4em; padding-right: 4em}
blockquote {padding-left: 4em; font-weight: bold}
</style>
</head><body>
<h1>Testing Soft Hyphens</h1>
<p>
Select and copy this number to the clipboard:
</p><blockquote>
1234567890­1234567890­1234567890
</blockquote><p>
You should get this:
</p><blockquote>
123456789012345678901234567890
</blockquote><p>
In Firefox we get this (showing the hyphens):
</p><blockquote>
1234567890-1234567890-1234567890
</blockquote><p>
If you paste it into Word or Wordpad, you appear to get
123456789012345678901234567890, but try saving it as plain text
(or rtf and actually look at the file with a text viewer) you will
see the dreaded hyphens. They are meant to be hidden.
</p><p>
<b><i>For how many years now, has Firefox got it wrong?</i></b>
</p><hr />
</body>
</html>
November 15, 2011 at 8:48 am
Did you file/vote for a bugzilla entry for this?
November 15, 2011 at 1:52 pm
I’d say it MUST have been noticed by the millions of Firefox fans over the last 10 years or so, but not fixed because they will say it’s a feature not a bug.
OR unimportant to the “average” user.