YOU! YOU!!!! YOU ARE THE BEST!

I am admittedly not well versed in much of programming. Jack of all trades master of none type. I've never even used the debugger properly until today, and I only know that now that you led me to it!(No idea about break points etc.) I assumed there were 'hidden' characters, but was unsure of how to detect them and didn't even want to assume my programming was correct in itself. Your 2 lines saved my sanity!

I would like to ask a few more questions of I may:
What made this date different from the others?
Why is it unicode when the rest are not?
How did you know it was unicode?
What is [^\u0000-\u007F] ?

I know that's a lot, sorry. But thank you so much for your accurate and concise answer. I GREATLY appreciate it!