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

#1

Post by vicjicama » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 5:48 PM UTC

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/)

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

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

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

#2

Post by mikewarot » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 7:04 PM UTC

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

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

#3

Post by johnboiles » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 8:20 PM UTC

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

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

#4

Post by johnboiles » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 8:21 PM UTC

johnboiles wrote: post #3

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...

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

#5

Post by kazinator » Wed, Jul 21, 2021, 12:09 AM UTC

The character is U+00A0.

C2 A0 is the UTF-8 encoding.

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

#6

Post by muzani » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 8:24 AM UTC

johnboiles wrote: post #3

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

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.

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

#7

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 9:53 AM UTC

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.

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

#8

Post by qwerty456127 » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 10:02 AM UTC

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