Is non-breaking space a space?

Erik Trulsson ertr1013 at student.uu.se
Tue Dec 2 00:49:46 PST 2003


On Tue, Dec 02, 2003 at 09:18:20AM +0100, Jean-Baptiste Quenot wrote:
> * Erik Trulsson:
> 
> > On Tue, Dec 02, 2003 at 01:31:07AM +0100, Jean-Baptiste Quenot wrote:
> >
> > > In /usr/src/share/mklocale, the file la_LN.ISO8859-1.src for example
> > > contains a  SPACE definition  that includes the  non-breaking space.
> > > It seems that it is so since  the beginning of FreeBSD, but is there
> > > some reference, some standard that states whether NBSP is considered
> > > a space or not?
> >
> > If    you    look    at    the    locale    definitions    found    at
> > http://www.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC22/WG15 it  would seem that NBSP  should be
> > considered  as  a space  character,  but  there  might be  some  other
> > standard somewhere else that says differently.
> 
> That's  also   my  opinion.   Let's   explain  the  whole   story:   I'm
> reformatting my  email messages with  textproc/par, and I  noticed since
> I'm using FreeBSD  that all non-breaking spaces are  converted to spaces
> during filtering,  just because isspace(160)  is true.  Of course,  if I
> put non-breaking  spaces in my text,  I'm not expecting the  lines to be
> broken on them, and I don't want  them to be filtered out, because nbsps
> make sense when used appropriately.
> 
> After a while,  I discovered that the issue is  related to locales.  And
> IMHO it  makes sense  not to consider  nbsp as a  space.  Where  shall I
> report the problem?

I would say that is a problem with the tool you are using, in that it
does not seem to be aware of the existence of non-breaking spaces, or
treat them specially.

I think that NBSP should be considered as a space (if nothing else the
very name "non-breaking space" implies that it is a space, albeit a not
a normal space), but it should not be considered as a word-separator.
Unfortunately many programs (and many standards for that matter) assume
that all types of whitespace are word-separators as well, which they
probably shouldn't do.


-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se


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