Beware of the Unicode no-break space (0xC2 0xA0) | Hacker News Reader

Beware of the Unicode no-break space (0xC2 0xA0)

11 pointsvicjicama7 comments

Hi all!

Yesterday I saw a very strange behavior while working with some tags, I thought this was a bug!

Can you spot the difference? (https://jsfiddle.net/vbjtcf3d/)

<div pagews-snapshot="true" referenceid="remotemkt.listws.app" snapshotid="snapshot/board-companies" ></div>

the other ( https://jsfiddle.net/q9d08xp1/ )

<div pagews-snapshot="true" referenceid="remotemkt.listws.app" snapshotid="snapshot/board-companies" ></div>

Both looks exactly the same!, but only one is working....

It turn out that it was an unicode character issue, the spacing between the non working tag was using the unicode non-breaking space (0xC2 0xA0), when I replaced the spaces with the regular space character (0x20) everything worked again.

I think that I copied this tag from an email, I will be extra careful in the future for this kind of issues.

It took me a while to find out this, I hope this could help anyone, if your attributes are null and you are sure that they are present check you html with a hex editor.

Let me know your thoughts

If you use Evernote, at some point in the last year or so they started rewriting their spaces an non breaking space characters. I get tripped up almost weekly by some command or code I pasted from my notes

Thread on the issue

https://discussion.evernote.com/forums/topic/129900-non-brea...

This is the main reason I stopped subscribing to Evernote. It messes up my notes and I can't even see how. I'd use another note taking tool, but most are worse. It would be nice to have something with just plaintext, even without formatting.

Thanks for the heads up. Life sure seemed simpler when it was just ASCII and American English to worry about. ;-)

The character is U+00A0.

C2 A0 is the UTF-8 encoding.

IMHO all the parsers should update to address this. A space is still a space even if it's a non-breaking one.

Another thing that trips me up regularly is BOM bytes at the start of text files, it can be really hard to debug if you don't know about them.

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