Re: Whitespace and '&nbsp'

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 26, 2011, 21:57 UTC
Message-ID: <7vzkm9unu0.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <BANLkTik7eJ=BC9Bekqu-W1-r0cheCjC+wg@mail.gmail.com>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

> So I just got a patch that had a hidden &nbsp in it (unicode: u00a0,
> utf-8: \0302\0240) and sad to say my terminal window shows no
> indication of that what-so-ever. It looks exactly like a regular
> space, except gcc won't actually accept it.

I have been annoyed by these   in mailing list traffic in general, not just in patches. In my MUA, they are shown as inverted whitespace.

We could certainly add a new whitespace error class (nbsp?) to diagnose and fix to "git apply". I do not think people deliberately put these things to their editor, so there probably is no urgent need to add the same diagnosis to "git diff", but these days they tend to share the common code, so that may come for free.

But in the longer term, I think we should find what MUA causes this breakage and yell at them. It might be some mail relays, but I am not sure where these come from. I often see alternating real whitespace and nbsp in "> " indented quotes.