A Unicode space killed my cron for 2.5 hours (opens in new tab)

My cron job died for two and a half hours on June 16. Nothing logged. No exception trace anywhere. The only thing that noticed was another cron job, and it noticed because a file's modification time had stopped moving. The killer was one character: U+202F, a NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE. It arrived in the body of a single email from a prospect at deviensartisan.com. My poller's print() statement tried to write it to a Windows console running cp1252, and the whole process died before it could log a s...