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Is a non-break space whitespace?

Posted by Peter Kenny on Sep 24, 2017; 11:53am
URL: https://forum.world.st/Is-a-non-break-space-whitespace-tp4971514.html

Hello All

 

I have a little puzzle to disturb your Sunday lunch, maybe. I have been scraping text data from web pages, which often comes with redundant space before or after. I routinely use ‘trim’ on the final string output, but I have found cases where there are still redundant spaces. Inspecting the results, I find that the characters are non-break spaces (codepoint 160, Unicode U+00A0). Looking at the code, String>>#trim depends on Character>>#isSeparator, which does not answer true for a non-break space. I can use trimBoth: [:char| char asInteger = 160] to remove the redundant spaces if I know where to expect them, so it is not a major problem. But the question remains: should non-break space be included in the list of separators in Character>>#isSeparator.

 

Peter Kenny