A Unicode space killed my cron for 2.5 hours
Dev.to / 6/18/2026
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Key Points
- A Python cron poller stopped producing logs for about 2.5 hours because a single email body contained the Unicode character U+202F (NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE).
- When the script’s verbose path attempted to write this character to a Windows console encoded as cp1252, the process crashed before it could record any diagnostic message.
- The only external symptom was that a separate cron job observed a file’s modification time no longer updating, which indirectly signaled the poller failure.
- The author uses this incident to illustrate why small encoding/character-handling bugs can evade test suites and fail silently in production.
- The article walks through the poller’s workflow (IMAP retrieval, message classification via Claude Haiku, Kanban ticket creation) and highlights why production logging/verbose output enabled the bug to manifest.
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