Zero-width characters embedded in phone number whenever they are copied from the macOS address book

update 12/2021: This is still NOT fixed as of macOS 12.0.1 Monterey. Unbelievable.

This isn't an answer but I wanted to add a screenshot as some people have requested it.

I noticed this bug as well (as recently as 10.15.7) and was glad to find this already reported, and surprised it hasn't received more attention.

I filed bugs #47763641 & #5235503 with Apple, hopefully they will notice. I encourage others to report it.

Here are steps to repro & a screenshot that shows the issue:

1. From Contacts.app, right-click → Copy on a phone number.
2. Paste into Sublime Text or any other plaintext editor.
3. Save as test.txt
4. Open in a Hex Editor, I used Hex Fiend in this example
5. You can now see the extra bytes (I highlighted them below)

a couple of bits of information:

1. This seems to only affect phone# fields. Others such as email, addresses, notes etc don't exhibit this bug.
2. If, instead of using ⌘command + A (select-all), you very carefully select just from the start of the phone# to the end and then copy, the unwanted zwsp characters aren't copied.

My workaround for now is an Alfred workflow that I mapped to ⌘⇧C that copies the selected field and trims the whitespace. Not exactly elegant, but it works well enough until Apple fixes this (which they may have as of 11.0)