@Sylvester-Bullitt ,
But when I type the same string into the forum dialog, the soft hyphen doesn’t show as it did before
That’s because soft-hyphen is a non-printing character, and the forum doesn’t display non-printing characters (because they have no glyph to display). As I said in my first reply, your original paste into the forum used a normal ASCII hyphen, which is why it was visible in the forum.
[deleted post]
I originally commented on your deleted post (yes, as a moderator, I can see it), but I decided to retract that part, because maybe you deleted it because you already realized what you did wrong.
I’m going to have to shut down for the night
Sounds like you need the sleep. I hope (by the time you read this) that you got it.