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Comment by messe | Hacker News Reader

For anybody wondering, the likely origin of the invalid character is somebody using an Apple Ireland/UK keyboard layout where # is Option-3 (AltGr-3), and non-breaking space is Option-Space (AltGr-Space).

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I recently added a Rake task to one of our builds which checks for the exact problem mentioned in GP, after having 3 separate occasions in the last 6 months where OSX "smart" characters have changed the encoding of a file consumed by things expecting pure ascii.

Unfortunately it is a bit of a hack that shells out to "file -i", but I'll take it over hours of frustration.

I don't know how many times these non-breaking spaces caused problems. I think linters should prevent commits that contain non-breaking spaces. And if really one is needed, it should be encoded as ` ` or with whatever encoding is relevant.

…or fix the non-Unicode compatible systems that are consuming the commit messages and breaking? If they fail with an nbsp then they’re probably also going to fail with more obviously useful non-ASCII characters.

How often are non-breaking spaces purposely inserted vs accidentally? And the tools might handle them fine but will produce strange results or errors. An example is inserting a non-breaking space in a document or string. It will prevent word wrap, which might not have been the user intent. A linter that requires these spaces to be explicitly set in encoded form would avoid these issues.

Non-breaking spaces are required to typeset French correctly, at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_mark#Stylistic_varian.... The accidental insertion of non-breaking spaces is a possible issue, and it's a bit harder to detect than other typos, but it's also probably not as bad as other typos. Overall I think it's a bit hard to make the case that they should be disallowed.

I was forced to gain very intimate knowledge of a web based rich text editor that would use non-breaking space characters as markers to monitor current user selection.

> whatever encoding is relevant

Such as UTF-8?

Ah I would have bet good money on an apple product being involved.

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