Re: Does regular Unicode have a character that looks like a space to a human yet is not treated as a space by software please?

2014-03-27 15:10, Kalvesmaki, Joel wrote:

> William, try the U+2000..U+200A glyphs under General Punctuation--I think
> that's what you're looking for to manage precise widths of blank space.

That range contains some “fixed-width spaces”, yes. Being “fixed-width”
is rather relative here, though, and many fonts do not contain these
characters. Rendering software could of course display them by just
leaving suitable spacing, but that’s not common.

The “fixed-width spaces” are mostly just legacy characters, holdover
from old typography. They may have their uses, though, in contexts where
they work and other spacing methods don’t (for example, I recently
noticed that they seem to be the only way to create a little spacing
between an inline equation and normal character in MS Word).

But for the purposes of indenting text lines, I don’t think they are
useful. In almost all cases, there are better tools for indentation.

> And many (most?) software routines do not treat these as part of the class
> of spacing characters (\s in regular expressions).

Well, most regexp implementations are very Ascii-oriented: notations
like \s, \w, \d, etc. match Ascii characters only.

Yucca

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Received on Thu Mar 27 2014 - 10:05:21 CDT