Re: dashes and non-breaking spaces

[Stefan Monnier]

>> The word "must" makes this statement so strong that it surprises me.
>> Why do you think this is such a great problem?

> I often receive broken UTF-8 messages.  People quote UTF-8 texts with
> German "umlauts" and treat these texts as iso-8859-1 encoded resulting
> in escapes instead of 'ß', for example:

>> 'Die Stadt heiÃ\237t "Lutherstadt Wittenberg".'
>                  heißt (corrected)

> "\237" and some other escapes can often occur and then the text is
> disturbed with many blue fragments.

Well, to me whether the \237 is written in blue or not doesn't make
any difference: it's garbage.  Do you really think that displaying the
escape sequence in the normal face rather than in blue makes the text much
less "disturbed"?

> Messages written in French often contain non-breaking spaces
> intentionally and legitimately; adding a special marker to them destroys
> the text (Stefan Monnier explained it in a previous message).

Right, and this is a separate concern and is controlled by
a different variable.


        Stefan