Ok in almost ever email this string appears somewhere in the email…
How did it get there, cause when I type an email its on there.
Why is it there? its make no sense to me.
Who? what program put it there?
please help me put an awnser to this mystery!
It’s HTML for a non-breaking space. (ie, a space where a word wrap won’t occur). Are you using HTML formatted email? If so, your email program is putting it in where it feels it’s needed. When you read the email in a non-html program, you see it. Also, it might just be slightly bad HTML, so it shows up.
It is the HTML entity for a non-breaking space. If you are reading an email with HTML in it in an email client that does not properly render HTML, then you will see 's in there.
To add to the answers given already, web browsers collapse extraneous spaces found in HTML code so that they display as a single character (e.g., if the HTML document contained “text<5 spaces>more text,” the browser will display “text<space>more text.” If you wanted to override this, you put “& nbsp” into the document instead of blank space (e.g., “text<& nbsp & nbsp>more text” will display as “text<2 spaces>more text.”
Now, this is interesting…
Upon preview, I noticed that the standard nbsp code (that is, ampersand-no space-nbsp) actually got converted to spaces – so I had to inject a space in between the ampersand and the nbsp to make the code display. Does this mean vB understands some HTML coding? Or is my browser doing it on the fly?
τυφων
My name in Greek. It appears correctly in the preview, which suggests that the board doesn’t convert the ampersand to & and therefore allows character entities (it certainly doesn’t allow HTML, though). The real test is what shows up when I hit submit…
Earthling, it’s really more of a character set issue than an HTML issue. It’s your browser doing it. And yes, it’ll work with just about every HTML escape sequence, depending on your browser. (IE seems to have the most trouble in this department.)
The reason for the existance of a non-breaking space in to keep single words which contain a space from wrapping around to the next line. I can’t think of a good example, but I worked with a star named HDE 226868, and it looked bad if the HDE was on one line and the 226868 was on the next. So I used non-breaking spaces. I used them in this post too, so if you want to see a non-breaking space in action, try to resize your window so that HDE 226868 is broken. The far more common usage is to do what Earthling mentions, putting extra spaces in between words and at the beginning of lines. This is not what it’s intended for, though.
Yes, vB understands special characters.
An easy way to use the forced or non-breaking space is to just hit ALT+0160 on your keypad.
Some boards convert it to an underscore character, though…
10 regular spaces.
__________10 ALT+0160 characters.
           10 &nbsp tokens.
           10 &#160 tokens.
Let’s see what happens…
-David
Okay, this really doesn’t have anything to do with vB. I’ll bet they had to do very little programming to get it to work. In fact, I’ll bet more effort went in to making sure it doesn’t happen with thread titles, as this thread shows.
True.
But with older versions of vB, you could use a non-breaking space in your username…
-David
interesting…I know some HTML and Ubb but I have never heard of the non-breaking code. thanks for all the help!
Here’s a list of the character entity references in HTML (the non-breaking space is first on the list). A lot of them are really handy. Standards-compliant browsers should support them all, but like I said, some have trouble.