Unicode "no-op" Character?

[Shawn Steele via Unicode]

I'm curious what you'd use it for?

From: Unicode <unicode-bounces at unicode.org> On Behalf Of Slawomir Osipiuk via Unicode
Sent: Friday, June 21, 2019 5:14 PM
To: unicode at unicode.org
Subject: Unicode "no-op" Character?

Does Unicode include a character that does nothing at all? I'm talking about something that can be used for padding data without affecting interpretation of other characters, including combining chars and ligatures. I.e. a character that could hypothetically be inserted between a latin E and a combining acute and still produce É. The historical description of U+0016 SYNCHRONOUS IDLE seems like pretty much exactly what I want. It only has one slight disadvantage: it doesn't work. All software I've tried displays it as an unknown character and it definitely breaks up combinations. And U+0000 NULL seems even worse.

I can imagine the answer is that this thing I'm looking for isn't a character at all and so should be the business of "a higher-level protocol" and not what Unicode was made for... but Unicode does include some odd things so I wonder if there is something like that regardless. Can anyone offer any suggestions?

Sławomir Osipiuk
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