Is non-breaking space a space?

[Jean-Baptiste Quenot]

Hello,

I'm wondering why the non-breaking space is considered as a space in the
FreeBSD  C library,  whereas  it is  not  in the  GNU  libc.  Sorry  for
comparing the two,  but as a result, Linux and  FreeBSD are incompatible
in the way  they handle isspace(160).  This *only*  occurs when LC_CTYPE
is given « single C chars locales » like en_US.ISO8859-1.

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?

BTW  the  « official » [1]sources  for  glibc  ctype functions  have  an
interesting comment:

        static bool
        is_space (unsigned int ch)
        {
          /* Don't make U+00A0 a space. Non-breaking space means that all programs
             should treat it like a punctuation character, not like a space. */

Best regards,
-- 
Jean-Baptiste Quenot
http://caraldi.com/jbq/

[1] http://sources.redhat.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/libc/localedata/gen-unicode-ctype.c?rev=1.4&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&cvsroot=glibc
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