Editor: unexpected space=no break space

[jlaurens]

Bug description:
The editor sees space and non break space identically.

Steps to reproduce the problem:

1. Create a .tex file containing the space characters U+0020 and U+00A0.
2. Open the file with TeXworks

Expected behavior:

TeXworks makes a difference between the spaces like TeX

General information:
TeXworks version: Version 0.6.8 ("github") [r.6b1c6ab, ]
TeXworks obtained from:
Operating system: macOS 13.4.1 (c) (22F770820d)

Additional information:

[stloeffler]

What do you mean by "sees them identically"? In my tests (Tw 0.7 on Ubuntu), U+00A0 is preserved during saving and loading and also is "non-breaking" in terms of line wrapping. Visually, it resembles a space (i.e., blank), but if you want you can define a custom syntax highlighting pattern to give it, e.g., a background color.
What kind of other difference would you suggest?

[jlaurens]

On 0.6.8, MacOS 13

1. create from [email protected] a file with only a U+0020 space and a U+00A0 space.
2. Open the [email protected] find panel, enter a U+0020 space in the search field
3. press the Find button: [email protected] only finds the first space: this is an expected behavior
   If you close the file and open it with [email protected], after step 2) [email protected] unexpectedly finds both spaces
   As you mention, the underlying data does make the difference between the spaces.

On 0.7, MacOS 13 (Version 0.7 ("personal") [r.eb0b55e3, 17/03/2024 11:11])

1. create from [email protected] a file with only a U+0020 space and a U+00A0 space.
2. Open the [email protected] find panel, enter a U+0020 space in the search field
3. press the Find button: [email protected] unexpectedly finds both spaces
   With 0.7 the problem occurs even without reopening the file

[stloeffler]

I see - I can confirm this behavior. Some digging revealed that this might be by design deep in the Qt source code, where QChar::Nbsp is deliberately replaced by a space before searching...
So I guess that means we'll have to write our own search function...