Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 09:49:42 +0100 From: Erik Trulsson <ertr1013@student.uu.se> To: questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Is non-breaking space a space? Message-ID: <20031202084942.GA65870@falcon.midgard.homeip.net> In-Reply-To: <20031202081818.GA1463@watt.intra.caraldi.com> References: <20031202003105.GA11013@watt.intra.caraldi.com> <20031202052858.GA11469@falcon.midgard.homeip.net> <20031202081818.GA1463@watt.intra.caraldi.com>
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On Tue, Dec 02, 2003 at 09:18:20AM +0100, Jean-Baptiste Quenot wrote: > * Erik Trulsson: > > > On Tue, Dec 02, 2003 at 01:31:07AM +0100, Jean-Baptiste Quenot wrote: > > > > > In /usr/src/share/mklocale, the file la_LN.ISO8859-1.src for example > > > contains a SPACE definition that includes the non-breaking space. > > > It seems that it is so since the beginning of FreeBSD, but is there > > > some reference, some standard that states whether NBSP is considered > > > a space or not? > > > > If you look at the locale definitions found at > > http://www.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC22/WG15 it would seem that NBSP should be > > considered as a space character, but there might be some other > > standard somewhere else that says differently. > > That's also my opinion. Let's explain the whole story: I'm > reformatting my email messages with textproc/par, and I noticed since > I'm using FreeBSD that all non-breaking spaces are converted to spaces > during filtering, just because isspace(160) is true. Of course, if I > put non-breaking spaces in my text, I'm not expecting the lines to be > broken on them, and I don't want them to be filtered out, because nbsps > make sense when used appropriately. > > After a while, I discovered that the issue is related to locales. And > IMHO it makes sense not to consider nbsp as a space. Where shall I > report the problem? I would say that is a problem with the tool you are using, in that it does not seem to be aware of the existence of non-breaking spaces, or treat them specially. I think that NBSP should be considered as a space (if nothing else the very name "non-breaking space" implies that it is a space, albeit a not a normal space), but it should not be considered as a word-separator. Unfortunately many programs (and many standards for that matter) assume that all types of whitespace are word-separators as well, which they probably shouldn't do. -- <Insert your favourite quote here.> Erik Trulsson ertr1013@student.uu.se
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