Michael (michka) Kaplan wrote: > But if you do not, what is the harm of a character that you cannot see > and which does not even have width or cause line breaking behavior? > Realistically, what would the problem be?
The fact that the 0xFEFF character will not affect the display does not mean that there is no problem with it. If 0xFEFF is treated as a no-break space, then it is not a whitespace character. I haven't checked the Unicode standard, but I believe that my statement is true. Microsoft also changed the behavior of isspace() function not so long ago (now returns false for 0xFEFF). This is all correct, since no-break space (regardless of its width) is a 'character', not a space. However, this becomes a nuisance. If an application fails to remove the BOM prior to processing the contents of the file, or another application concats two files and does not remove the BOM of the second file, then parsing the file yields wrong results. 0xFEFF becomes a part of a word, and that word will no longer qualify as a keyword or, if it is an identifier, it does not match the original identifier (for example username). Regards, Lars
