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Ah right... yes, that is international.
And as you say... clicking on the link works.
The ­ unicode characters were added after a number of very long URLs were posted and broke the layout of certain long posts (notably the "lists of" links).
Because there is no internal space in a URL no amount of telling CSS to wrap text worked. The only solution was to add a form of zero-width whitespace that would allow browsers to wrap a long and solid URL at certain points. We add a ­ every 25 chars so that the browser width can be used to wrap at the appropriate point.
As you point out, clicking the link and following the href still works. In fact, the href is the only thing we will ever guarantee to work.
Velocio-
Ah right... yes, that is international.
So you do it for links regardless of the country of origin? Is that deliberate, or, as we might say in English, intentional?
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Fair enough...
Because there is no internal space in a URL no amount of telling CSS to wrap text worked.
The website monkeys at our place pointed me at: https://kenneth.io/blog/2012/03/04/word-wrapping-hypernation-using-css/ which they say works across all major supported browsers.
gbj_tester
Greenbank
Here's what 'cat -vet' on a selection of the page source looks like:-
Note the meta chars "M-BM--" in the middle of the text representation of the URL.