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
Received on Fri Jun 21 2019 - 23:46:07 CDT