From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Thu, 26 May 2011 21:12:31 GMT
Subject: Whitespace and '&nbsp'
Message-ID: <BANLkTik7eJ=BC9Bekqu-W1-r0cheCjC+wg@mail.gmail.com>

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.

So I'm wondering whether git shouldn't be escaping things like that in
diffs, for example. Looking at binary noise (using "git diff --text"),
I notice we have other things that don't get escaped either, although
at least then "less" will escape it for us. Again, for &nbsp, less
doesn't show it any different than a regular space either.

Yeah, I'm sure there is some programming font out there that makes it
visible, but I do wonder whether git should help.

I even used "--whitespace=fix" to apply the patch, but git doesn't
even recognize the thing as whitespace, so that didn't make any real
difference.

                          Linus