Re: Whitespace and '&nbsp'

Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] 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
     ^
    

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) {
        ^
       

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/