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
More information about the freebsd-questions
mailing list