fontenc causes error in appendix table of content [duplicate]

Question

I am making a table of content for my appendices, but when I use fontenc a strange series of letters appears in the compiled pdf file.

my code:

\documentclass[10pt,a4paper,dvipsnames]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{etoc}

\begin{document}
\appendix

\etocdepthtag.toc{mtappendix}
\etocsettagdepth{mtchapter}{none}
\etocsettagdepth{mtappendix}{subsection}
\tableofcontents‎‎
\clearpage

\section{The first section}
\section{The second section}
\section{The third section}

\end{document}

Under the table of contents is a strange text appearing, as visible in the image below:

But this is not visible when I deactivate the fontenc package:

This is part of my thesis for which I really need the fontenc package. I believe that I cannot choose a different font without it. Is anybody able to help me out so I can use fontenc without the funny letters in my table of contents?

Answer 1

Note that you are getting accent A typeset this is because you have UTF-8 character data in your file and you have a latex older than the 2018 release, and have not declared UTF-8 with

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

which is required for older latex releases.

If you had declared to latex that you were using UTF-8 then you would have had an error message that U+200E is not set up for LaTeX,

The solution is to simply delete those characters from that line (as they are invisible control characters it may be easier to delete the line and retype it)

Answer 2

You have two LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK (U+200E) in your source right after the \tableofcontents command. Delete them.

Notice that when using Emacs you can make this obvious once the variable glyphless-char-display-control has been customized to use something else than thin space for such characters.