On 24-09-17 13:53, PBKResearch wrote:
I have a little puzzle to disturb your Sunday lunch, maybe. I have been scraping text data from web pages, which often comes with redundant space before or after. I routinely use ‘trim’ on the final string output, but I have found cases where there are still redundant spaces. Inspecting the results, I find that the characters are non-break spaces (codepoint 160, Unicode U+00A0). Looking at the code, String>>#trim depends on Character>>#isSeparator, which does not answer true for a non-break space. I can use trimBoth: [:char| char asInteger = 160] to remove the redundant spaces if I know where to expect them, so it is not a major problem. But the question remains: should non-break space be included in the list of separators in Character>>#isSeparator.
In unicode, there are many more 'characters' that could be considered whitespace. You are collecting data from web pages, so you have no influence on what you'll get as input. I don't think this should be solved in #isSeparator.
Stephan
