Re: [Docutils-users] Re: Problem (?) with inline literals

[David G. <go...@py...>]

David Abrahams wrote:
> Did we discuss the idea that escaped whitespace disappears?
> 
>     F(``a``\ `1`:sub:, ``a``\ `2`:sub:, ... ``a``\ `N`:sub:)

No, I don't think we have.  It's a definite possibility.  There are many
different ways to approach the problem.  This one seems to be the most
elegant so far.

Writing the roles first makes it read better::

    F(``a``\ :sub:`1`, ``a``\ :sub:`2`, ... ``a``\ :sub:`N`)

> It's unfortunate that you really want '\ ' for a  ,

I believe some people have expressed a desire for a non-breaking space in
the past.  If it was "really wanted", it would already be there. ;-)  We're
just talking now; no decisions yet.

With Unicode and encodings available (UTF-8, Latin-1, etc.), we can directly
code   as \u00A0 or \xA0.  Same with soft hyphens (­: \u00AD or
\xAD), and any other Unicode character.  This lessens (eliminates?) the need
for the "escape sequence -> concrete character" kind of character
processing.  We're left with functional character processing, which is much
more limited in scope.

> since the need for breaking non-space comes up much more often in my work.

What do you mean by "breaking non-space"?  Do you mean "zero-width space",
\u200B?

-- David Goodger    http://starship.python.net/~goodger

Programmer/sysadmin for hire: http://starship.python.net/~goodger/cv