I was working in the Command Processor to fix a BitLocker problem. I needed to enter a couple of commands which were posted in the CoNetrix blog. To be sure I didn’t make any typing mistakes, I copied the first command into Notepad where I verified the input and then copied and pasted into the Command Processor. Doing that I got an error, the command wouldn’t work. I retried several times, none were successful. Eventually I resorted to typing the command directly into the Command Processor and, surprise, surprise, it worked.
For the second command I committed the same error (not always a fast learner). I got errors when pasting the command and success when I typed the command directly. [more]
Since this happened to me twice I began to research the problem with pasting info into the Command Processor and discovered it was a problem with two different characters entered for the dash (-) character. While one character was entered by pasting, a different character was entered when manually typing. In testing I discovered this is true both in Notepad and the Command Processor. (If I retyped the dash in Notepad before copying and pasting into the Command Processor, the command worked.) The problem comes because there is no visible difference in the characters, both look the same in Notepad and Windows processor, but behind the scenes, in the code for the characters, there is a difference. While I haven’t researched this beyond the dash characters, I would imagine there could also be problems with other special characters as well.
The gotcha is not to assume characters are the same just because they appear the same.