On Fri, 1 Jun 2007, Bonhôte André wrote:
I have a problem with invisible characters here. E.g. writing perl code, I use || quite often. I produce this character on my Swiss German keyboard using Option-7. Normally, I put a space after || to increase readability. There it happens that I keep the option key pressed while pressing the space key - and this apparently produces some invisible character. In any case, perl complains:
Unrecognized character \xC2 at /Users/abonhote/test2.pl line 5.
I have turned on "show invisibles", but the extra character doesn't show up. How can I avoid typing these characters?
That's a UTF-8 non-breaking space (it's actually the sequence 0xA0, 0xC2). I had hoped you could use the Perl "use utf8" or "use encoding 'utf8'" pragmas to convince Perl to accept the nbsp as a plain space, but no such luck.
Another alternative to the snippet suggestion would be to assign a macro to find all occurrences of the nbsp and replace them with a space.
FWIW, for me the "Show Invisibles" setting shows the nbsp character as dot, probably the Unicode code point 2022 BULLET character (•). Maybe you're using a font which doesn't contain this glyph?