The soft hyphen tells the user agent where a line break can occur.

For operations such as searching and sorting, the soft hyphen should always be ignored.

Another method is to use a soft hyphen.

Use the soft hyphen in words which would not be hyphenated if they fell in the middle of a line.

Soft hyphens are inserted into the text at the positions where hyphenation may occur.

More than one soft hyphen can be inserted into a word, as in 'communications' in Task 27 below.

Those browsers that interpret soft hyphens must observe the following semantics.

A word without hyphens can be made wrappable by having soft hyphens in it.

Additional semantics associated with the soft hyphen vary.

A soft hyphen is only used to indicate where a word can be split when breaking text lines and is not displayed.

In troff, the soft hyphen is .

Hyphenate 'communications' using soft hyphens in 3 places successively: 'com-muni-ca-tions'.

According to the Unicode standard, a soft hyphen is not displayed if the line is not broken at that point.

If a line is not broken at a soft hyphen, the user agent must not display a hyphen character.

It is a tedious task to insert the soft hyphens by hand, and tools using hyphenation algorithms are available that do this automatically.

Its semantics and HTML implementation are comparable to but different from the soft hyphen.

At position 0xA0 there's always the non breaking space and 0xAD is mostly the soft hyphen, which only shows at line breaks.

When the word isn't wrapped (i.e., isn't broken across lines), the soft hyphen isn't visible.

To show the effect of a soft hyphen, the following words have been separated with soft hyphens:

Soft hyphens have been used to obscure malicious domains or URLs in e-mail spam.

Soft hyphen (U+00AD)

Format (Cf) - Includes the soft hyphen, control characters to support bi-directional text, and language tag characters.

The soft hyphen's semantics and HTML implementation are in many ways similar to the zero-width space.

In TeX and LaTeX, the soft hyphen is represented by the command .

Jukka Korpela, Soft hyphen (SHY) - a hard problem?