For the record, I found out how you end up with the U+200B, this always happens when you paste a url from a trac page with chrome. For example, the sage trac homepage has
Your trac account also grants you access to <a class="ext-link" href="http://wiki.sagemath.org"><span class="icon"></span>the sage wiki</a>. If you copy&paste this with chrome (I'm using 29.0.1547.41 beta) then you end up with Your trac account also grants you access to <U+200B>the sage wiki. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.