Re: Should nonbreakable space belong to whitespace class?
On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 04:35:44PM +1030, Clytie Siddall wrote:
> This has generated some discussion on bbedit-talk, the more
> productive of which is below:
>
> On 24/02/2006, at 4:21 PM, Nigel Stanger wrote:
>
> >On 24/2/2006 5:21 PM, "Charlie Garrison" <garrison@zeta.org.au>
> >spake thus:
> >
> >>I'm far from an expert in this field, but I consider non-breaking
> >>spaces to be part of a word (similar to a hyphen).
> >
> >While this is true from the point of view of determining whether to
> >insert a line break or similar (hence "non-breaking space"), I would
> >argue that it's *not* true from the point of view of determining
> >what is and isn't a word.
As told by Jacob Sparre Andersen, regular expression engines often
provide a dedicated expression for this purpose.
> >Therefore I would see no problem with including non-breaking spaces
> >in the whitespace class. In fact, to me it seems rather perverse that
> >something that visually is *clearly* white space is not classed as
> >white space. To say that "white space" should be considered one word
> >whereas "white space" is considered two just doesn't make sense to
> >me.
Honestly I do not understand this discussion at all. People have an
opinion on a character they do not normally use in their language,
and want to change its meaning. Those who have legitimate uses
of this character are of course angry. See for instance
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=218277
it is harmful for French people because we cannot enter 0xa0 in HTML
forms, but other people insist on misusing it :(
Denis
Reply to: