On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote: > It is a space. The only difference between 0x20 and 0xa0 is that the > former is a line-break opportunity and the latter is not.
Not quite. There are many other differences. The more important ones: 0xa0 is not in ASCII, and more importantly is only in the ISO 8859 series of character sets. No-break space does appear in other character sets; e.g. in Unicode it is U+00a0. But that ends up as different octets in UTF-8. No-break space, whether 0xa0 or any other form, is *NOT* equivalent to space in Internet protocols, including message headers and MIME headers. It is a bug to generate 0xa0 in any protocol where 0x20 is called for; and it is a bug to treat 0xa0 as 0x20. In summary, 0xa0 is very deceiving. It looks like a space on many terminals, it behaves very much like a space, but it most assuredly is not a space. -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
