diff doesn't treat non-breaking space as whitespace

[Andrew Pam]

When "diff" is run with the "-b" or "-w" options, it fails to treat non-breaking space characters (U+00A0) as whitespace.

[Simon Law (sfllaw)]

From what I understand, the non-breaking space character is a printable graphical punctuation that must not be considered whitespace.

[Andrew Pam (xanni)]

On Fri, Apr 28, 2006 at 06:09:42AM -0000, Simon Law wrote:
> >From what I understand, the non-breaking space character is a printable
> graphical punctuation that must not be considered whitespace.

Documentation please?

There are now programming languages such as Perl and Java in which the
code itself can be encoded as UTF-8, and the non-breaking space may
indeed be valid whitespace. Perhaps diff needs a new option to treat
this character as whitespace?

Regards,
 Andrew
--
mailto:<email address hidden> Andrew Pam
http://www.xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
http://www.glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
http://www.sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics

[Connor Imes (ckimes)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue for you. Can you try with the latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

[Ralph Janke (txwikinger)]

We'd like to figure out what's causing this bug for you, but we haven't heard back from you in a while. Could you please provide the requested information? Thanks!

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for diffutils (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Andrew Pam (xanni)]

This issue still exists with diffutils 1:2.8.1-18 in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx)

$ diff -w -u test1 test2
--- test1 2010-11-19 16:26:59.775179676 +1100
+++ test2 2010-11-19 16:27:11.912635830 +1100
@@ -1,2 +1,2 @@
 space
-non-breaking space
+ non-breaking space

[Andrew Pam (xanni)]

Note: MKS diff correctly handles Unicode.

[Hans Ginzel (hans-matfyz)]

Bug still exists in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (trusty).

What about thin space (U+2009) or narrow no-break space (U+202F)?

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_space, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character.