[TxMt] Invisible characters

[Steve King]

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?

-- 
Steve King, <steve at narbat.com>