Case of the Non-Breaking Space (Part I)

Published 1st May 2020 by Jonathan Purdom

The non breaking space prevents an automatic line break at its position. It is often used in word processing and office applications. The space is no different visually to a normal space character.

When this space appears in a Razor View it doesn't cause any errors until runtime. When the view is rendered it can fail or have strange behaviour on the layout.

Any Character can be converted into its Unicode value using .Net

Unicode Character 'Non Breaking Space' (U+00A0)
Unicode Character 'Space' (U+0020)

So how can you see whether you have a non-breaking space?

Script : Show Unicode Values

The script below can be used in LINQPad. It will get the text from the clipboard, convert each character to its Unicode value and then finally dump the object to the output window.

using System;
using System.Linq;
using System.Windows.Forms;

void Main()
{
	Func<char,string> ConvertToUnicode = (t) =>  $"U+{Convert.ToUInt16(t):X4} ";

	var input= Clipboard.GetText();
	var result = input.Select(t => new CharacterDetail
                       { Character = t,UnicodeValue = ConvertToUnicode(t) }).ToList();
	result.Dump();
}


public class CharacterDetail
{
	public char Character { get; set; }
	public string UnicodeValue { get; set; }
}

Output

Below is an example output from running the script above.

Character	UnicodeValue
v	U+0076
o	U+006F
i	U+0069
d	U+0064
	U+0020
m	U+004D
a	U+0061
i	iU+0069
n	U+006E