G'day hrcerq,

"I hope I'm not saying anything stupid, but is ​ a subroutine call?"

There's certainly nothing "stupid" in your question. I was going to comment on that directly myself before scrolling down and seeing your post.

The ​ is an HTML entity reference: a code which references a specific character. This is its decimal form. You may also see this in its hexadecimal form, ​, or as a named entity, ​. It is the Unicode® ZERO WIDTH SPACE (U+200B) character — the PDF code chart "General Punctuation Range: 2000–206F" has details; "Wikipedia: Zero-width space" has further discussion.

How that got into the presented code — perhaps an artefact of a word processor used to write the code; maybe copied from an email; or whatever — is immaterial. The fact that the OP didn't check the Preview before posting (also note the obvious, broken <{line-break}/code> end tag) is of much more concern to me: what other problems exist in the code (not shown) that the OP may not have bothered to check either.

"If so, isn't this notation deprecated?"

The notation is not so much "deprecated" as syntactically incorrect. Note that the following did not need the strict or warnings pragmata for the compilation to be aborted. 

$ perl -e '
my $job_flag = 0;
foreach my $i (0..$#ARGV) {
   &#8203;$opt{"job"} .= $ARGV[$i]." " if($job_flag);
   &#8203;$job_flag = 1 if($ARGV[$i] =~ /^(\-\-|\-)job$/);
   &#8203;undef $ARGV[$i] if($job_flag);
}
'
Number found where operator expected at -e line 4, near "&#8203"
        (Missing operator before 8203?)
Number found where operator expected at -e line 5, near "&#8203"
        (Missing operator before 8203?)
Number found where operator expected at -e line 6, near "&#8203"
        (Missing operator before 8203?)
syntax error at -e line 4, near "&#8203"
syntax error at -e line 5, near "&#8203"
syntax error at -e line 6, near "&#8203"
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.

[download]

The OP did not run this code!

Updates: I had some issues with the title of this post; three versions tried; see "What are the formatting rules for the "Title" of posts?" for details. I'd also fixed a copy/paste error: the first line of the code I posted ($ perl -e ') was originally missing.

— Ken

In reply to Re^2: @ARGV ignores quotes [ZERO WIDTH SPACE] by kcott
in thread @ARGV ignores quotes by ovedpo15

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.