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UTF-8 non-breaking spaces
- X-seq: zsh-workers 48250
- From: Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Zsh hackers list <zsh-workers@xxxxxxx>
- Subject: UTF-8 non-breaking spaces
- Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2021 11:15:47 -0700
- Archived-at: <https://zsh.org/workers/48250>
- Archived-at: <http://www.zsh.org/sympa/arcsearch_id/zsh-workers/2021-03/CAH%2Bw%3D7Z8-AOLSLD7dKD6bMJDv31-gyw2mAwKTiAHES6bWurBzA%40mail.gmail.com>
- List-id: <zsh-workers.zsh.org>
> If you're copy-pasting from an edit in browser gmail, for example, it
> has a tendency to insert non-breaking spaces whenever there is more
> than one consecutive space, which the shell interprets as
> non-whitespace and attempts to execute as commands.
Non-breaking space in this case is (bindkey syntax) "\M-B\M- ". The
error message is equally confusing because you still can't see the
non-breaking spaces when "not found" is reported.
Handling this is complicated by bracketed-paste, which protects the
non-breaking spaces from (for example) { bindkey -s '\M-B\M- ' ' ' }.
"unsetopt multibyte" does not affect this but LANG=C results in (for example)
(In gmail editor)
echo " " " "
(Pasted at shell prompt)
% echo " " "<c2><a0> "
That's totally a ZLE display thing, the actual nbsp is output when the
command executes, but at least you can see what's going on.
(The non-breaking spaces go back to normal spaces in sent email, I
believe, or at least do so when the message is displayed in gmail;
this is just a "thing" in the browser text editor.)
Similar goofiness can result when copy-pasting from other "smart"
multibyte editors when zsh has a UTF-8 variant in $LANG.
Any good suggestions how to deal with this in a non-confusing fashion?
Everything I've thought of (short of hacking up the lexer) risks
corrupting parts of the input that aren't intended to be word
separators (the bindkey -s above has that problem, for example, if
bracketed-paste is disabled).
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