Re: Whitespace and '&nbsp'

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: May 26, 2011, 22:08 UTC
Message-ID: <BANLkTi=hYR4ow1eMR3rHkMuVRsHJ=TFDZA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vzkm9unu0.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 2:57 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

>
> 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.

In this case, it was

  Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
  Content-Disposition: inline
  Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
  User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15)

so there was nothing odd in the MUA. And everything I have (gmail in web browser, less, gnome-terminal) treats the nbsp as a regular space, so it doesn't show up as any inverted block or anything like that for me until I tried to compile it.

It could easily have been there in the patch originally and wasn't compile-tested. On some keyboard layouts, AltGr+space gives a nbsp.

                        Linus