On 25 Sep 2017, at 09:53, Richard Sargent <richard.sargent@gemtalksystems.com> wrote:
Ben Coman wrote
On Sun, Sep 24, 2017 at 7:53 PM, PBKResearch <
peter@.co
> wrote:
Hello All
I have a little puzzle to disturb your Sunday lunch, maybe. I have been scraping text data from web pages, which often comes with redundant space before or after. I routinely use âtrimâ on the final string output, but I have found cases where there are still redundant spaces. Inspecting the results, I find that the characters are non-break spaces (codepoint 160, Unicode U+00A0). Looking at the code, String>>#trim depends on Character>>#isSeparator, which does not answer true for a non-break space. I can use trimBoth: [:char| char asInteger = 160] to remove the redundant spaces if I know where to expect them, so it is not a major problem. But the question remains: should non-break space be included in the list of separators in Character>>#isSeparator.
Peter Kenny
Off the cuff.. intuitively "by definition" a Non-Break space seems to be Not-a-Separator. If the web pages you are scraping are misusing non-break space to munge formatting, that is not something to be solved by modifying semantics of #isSeparator. Stef's suggestion for a selector that takes a list of separators seems appropriate.
Rather than off-the-cuffing anything, please honour the Unicode Character Properties. Refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_character_property#Whitespace, among others.
The Pharo Unicode Project (http://www.smalltalkhub.com/#!/~Pharo/Unicode) offers support for these properties. There is a performance cost though (it is a big database to load/use). I would not immediately change #isSeparator though.
cheers -ben
-- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html
