From: Ara.T.Howard@...
Date: 2004-09-24T01:44:34+09:00
Subject: Re: whitespace string only

On Fri, 24 Sep 2004, Markus wrote:

> On Thu, 2004-09-23 at 08:34, Ara.T.Howard@noaa.gov wrote:
>
>> since when is NUL whitespace!?  defintely against POLS.
>
> ?????
>
> Since when _isn't_ NUL whitespace?  Despite the fact that it is sometimes
> used as a delimiter (which is true for all the other whitespace characters
> as well), it has no meaning, no glyph, does not show up when printed--it
> doesn't even move the cursor/printhead.  How much more "whitespace" can you
> get?

from man

   man isspace
   ...
          isspace()
                 checks  for  white-space  characters.   In  the  "C" and "POSIX"
                 locales, these are: space,  form-feed  ('\f'),  newline  ('\n'),
                 carriage  return ('\r'), horizontal tab ('\t'), and vertical tab
                 ('\v').
   ...

from wikipedia

   In computer science, a whitespace (or a whitespace character) is any
   character which does not display itself but does take up space. For example,
   the character symbol " ", which is a blank space. Whitespaces are generated by
   the space bar or the Tab key; depending on context, a line-break generated by
   the Return key (Enter key) may be considered whitespace as well.

   Whitespace can also refer to a series of whitespace characters. Within source
   code, the size of whitespace is generally ignored by free-form languages. In
   the Python programming language whitespace and indentation are used for
   syntactical purposes.

   In many programming languages abundant use of whitespace, especially trailing
   whitespace at the end of lines, is considered a nuisance.

   [ \t]+ is a regular expression that matches whitespace.

   The term whitespace is based on the assumption that the background color used
   for text is white, and is thus confusing if it is not.


there is a long standing precendent for the meaning of whitespace.  it does not
include non-printables since that do not take up any __space__.  for that there
is isgraph(3)

-a
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