Comment by deepsun
4 years ago
All because we use programmatically interfaces that were intended for humans to write: command line, sql, html, email headers.
4 years ago
All because we use programmatically interfaces that were intended for humans to write: command line, sql, html, email headers.
It's worse than that. Whitespace is a hellish invention in the world of computers: there are multiple characters that may or may not render as whitespace with no way to distinguish them by just looking at the output.
Yet to the machine (script, shell, program, ...) it matters a lot, since u0020≠u0009≠u00A0≠u2000≠u2001, etc. whereas the aforementioned codepoints render like this: " " (and yes, that's indeed the five codepoint in that order - at least I typed them that way).
(Ab)Using whitespace like that can lead to all sorts of funny business, not just when dealing with shell scripts and variable expansion.