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non-printable characters in displayed text

  • 1 reply
  • 0 have this problem
  • 3 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

Carey
Carey
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I have been using the coderanch.com website for more than a decade and most of the postings include listings of source code which I was (past tense) able to cut a paste into my own development environment. With the latest version (107) of Firefox this has broken, the document now gets numerous non-printable characters (decimal 160) for the leading indents of the code. I'm assuming they are being somehow substituted for the tab character.

Here's an example 

https://coderanch.com/t/755856/certification/Questions-errata-Sybex-OCP-Study

I went back to version 105 and the problem went away. Also Chrome does not have this problem.

Please fix soon as it is impacting my ability to help others on the coderanch site.

I have been using the coderanch.com website for more than a decade and most of the postings include listings of source code which I was (past tense) able to cut a paste into my own development environment. With the latest version (107) of Firefox this has broken, the document now gets numerous non-printable characters (decimal 160) for the leading indents of the code. I'm assuming they are being somehow substituted for the tab character. Here's an example https://coderanch.com/t/755856/certification/Questions-errata-Sybex-OCP-Study I went back to version 105 and the problem went away. Also Chrome does not have this problem. Please fix soon as it is impacting my ability to help others on the coderanch site.

All Replies (1)

cor-el
cor-el
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Those are non-breaking spaces (U+00A0) and this is actually mentioned in the 107 release notes under Unresolved.

In order to better support certain typographical conventions, Firefox now preserves some non-breaking spaces when copying text to the clipboard instead of changing them to regular spaces. The new behavior is known to cause problems when non-breaking spaces are used for indentation.

  • 1769534 - Preserve non-breaking spaces when copying HTML content

(please do not comment in bug reports
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html)

Modified by cor-el