Tim Greenwood just pointed out to me a ‘bug’ in my converter program, which I think is actually, in my mind, a bug in Firefox (although I imagine it was implemented by someone as a feature).
If you type A0 (the hex code for a non-breaking space) in the Hexadecimal code points field, then press Convert, you will get a blank space in the Characters field that should be U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE. Then press Convert or View Names above this Characters field and you’ll find that what was supposed to be a NBSP has changed into an ordinary space. IE7, Opera and Safari all continue to show the character in the field as a NBSP.
(However, all four browsers substitute an ordinary space when you copy and paste the text from the Characters field into something else.)
I tried this with a range of other types of space , but had no such behaviour (try it). They all remained themselves.
Anyone know what this is about?
November 30th, 2007 at 4:56 am
Yes, this is a bug in Firefox and you’re right that it’s a consequence of a deliberate feature. However, it has already been fixed and the beta of Firefox 3 no longer does this conversion.
See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=218277 for more details.
December 1st, 2007 at 5:38 pm
Thanks Simon. Good to know. I’m looking forward to the Firefox 3 release. Seems it will fix a bunch of internationalization issues.
January 14th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
This is an irritating issue that I have also encountered. The Khmer Wikipedia clearly shows how they are using spaces between words, where they should be using NBSP (http://km.wikipedia.org/). This has been an absolute blocker for these languages to use wikis and web based localisation tools like Pootle (http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/pootle/index)