Monday, April 21, 2008

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Who among my readers believes that he/she has a firm grasp on the meaning of the term "whitespace" as it applies to modern Java development?

Anyone?

Whitespace! How much simpler could anything be than that?

Yeah. Well guess what. I've found, so far, six conflicting definitions worth knowing about. They are summarized in this table for your viewing enjoyment. I daresay you will be surprised at how bad the situation is.

2 comments:

Juha Lindfors said...

Yeah it can come as a surprise unless you've been working with Unicode for a while. And by that I mean really working with it more than just saying "everything in Java is Unicode".

I've taken to the practice of specifying which codepoint I'm talking about (e.g. \u0020) instead of "whitespace", especially when it comes to APIs. The disconnect with Char.isWhiteSpace() and String.trim() for example is annoying.

Unknown said...

I really like your writing style. Nice Post keep it up.

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