Re: Whitespace and '&nbsp'

From: Matthieu Moy <matthieu.moy@grenoble-inp.fr>
Date: May 26, 2011, 22:21 UTC
Message-ID: <vpqpqn5m7cc.fsf@bauges.imag.fr>
In-Reply-To: <7vzkm9unu0.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

> I do not think people deliberately put these things to their editor,

I never put them in C code, but I do often have some in text and LaTeX files: the French typography rules uses more spaces than the english ones, in places where one shouldn't break lines (before :, !, ? and inside « French quotes »). Real typographers would distinguish short non-breaking spaces and normal ones, but I usually don't ;-).

My editor shows them as a space underlined in slight color. One can reproduce this in a terminal with things like

echo -e '\033[3;4m '           # no color

or

echo -e '\033[1;4m\033[1;31m ' # red underline space

That's lighter than full red background, hence acceptable as a warning that people who purposely use &nbsp can ignore.

> But in the longer term, I think we should find what MUA causes this
> breakage and yell at them.

A common typo for French people is to type

foo | bar
     ^
   &nbsp;

since the | needs Alt-gr on azerty keyboard, and Alt-gr + Space gives a  . Particularly painfull to diagnose since the shell answers e.g.

zsh: command not found:  bar

{ and } also requires Alt-gr, so I can imagine someone typing

if (foo) {
        ^
      &nbsp;

by mistake.

> 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.

I often see them too, I guess the mailer does this to prevent other (broken) mailers from rewrapping, but I don't like it either.

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/