Re: Mysterious character "Â" in message archive

[Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@...>]

2011/11/22 Ashwin Hirschi <lua-l@reflexis.com>:
>
> Specifically, the "non-breaking space" character (U+00A0) can easily creep
> into emails and other web documents, since as a space character it's rather
> hard to spot by the human eye. The character is represented as (hex) A0 in
> good old-fashioned Latin-1 and as C2 A0 in UTF-8.
...
>
> P.S. Don't worry too much about them, though. They're not going to creep
> into your source by themselves [;-)].

Thanks a lot!  You've answered the secret reason behind my post too: some
of my Lua programs give this error:
    unexpected symbol near '�'
In gvim, I can convert to hex and I have seen the "c2 a0" that you mention.
So when I saw "&#xC2;" in the HTML source I thought it could be related.

The error happens much more often on my wife's PC than on mine.

Thanks to your post, I now know why.  Both computers have Compose
on R-Alt, just next to the space bar.  And Compose-Space-Space is
non-breaking space.  And I type two consecutive spaces quickly
all the time when coding Lua.  And the clincher: on my computer the
spacebar goes all the way past the M to under the comma, on hers it
stops halfway into the M!

So occasionally, but more often on hers, my thumb just brushes R-Alt on
its way to the spacebar, and the dreaded non-breaking space is formed.

Dirk