On Sun, Sep 24, 2017 at 7:53 PM, PBKResearch <pe...@pbkresearch.co.uk> wrote:
> Hello All > > > > 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. > > > > Peter Kenny > > > Off the cuff.. intuitively "by definition" a Non-Break space seems to be Not-a-Separator. If the web pages you are scraping are misusing non-break space to munge formatting, that is not something to be solved by modifying semantics of #isSeparator. Stef's suggestion for a selector that takes a list of separators seems appropriate. cheers -ben
