Unidentified whitespace character in Java

Question

Hi,

On extracting some html from a web page, I have some elements containing text that end in an unknown or non-matching whitespace character (ie does not match "\\s"):

<span>Monday </span>

In java, to check what this character is, I am doing:

String s = getTheSpanContent();
char c = s.charAt(s.length() -1);
int i = (int) c;

and the value of i is: 160

Anyone know what this is? And how I can match for it?

Thanks

Answer 1

That's \u00A0, also known as non-breaking space. If you know HTML, you'll understand that it's the same space as represented by  . Apparently one was using it instead of a normal space.

Answer 2

It's a non-breaking space. According to the Pattern Javadocs, \\s matches [ \t\n\x0B\f\r], so you'll have to explicitly add \xA0 to your regex if you want to match it.

Answer 3

Try using this to match whitespace

Character.isSpaceChar(c) || c <= ' ';

Answer 4

I made this spreadsheet once to show you some of the different definitions of whitespace used in Java. It's pretty fascinating (if you're weird like me).

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pd8dAQyHbdewRsnE5x5GzKQ

Incidentally, Guava's CharMatcher.WHITESPACE tracks the latest Unicode 5.x standard, and is thus often a better choice than JDK methods.

http://guava-libraries.googlecode.com