MINOR BUG: Output of U+00A0 (non-breaking space) in Browser Table is a space (U+0020)

Neo4j Graph Platform Browser
1

This was driving me mad for a while....

Somebody put an anomaly into my data, where a Unicode U+00A0 (non-breaking space) was put into one of my strings. This LOOKS like a space, but it will not match a real space U+0020.

So, I had two strings that looked identical but didn't match.

How Neo4J confused me, is when I RETURNed the string and copied it from a Table and then compared the string elsewhere, the non-breaking space got converted into a space instead of being left as is.

If you export the table as CSV, you do see that the non-breaking space is correctly output as UTF-8 sequence c2 a0 which is equivalent to Unicode U+00A0

00000010 22 0a 2d c2 a0 2d |".-..-|

Below is the screen shot of my steps (in chronically reverse order).

  1. I created a return value with non-breaking space: return "-\u00a0-"
  2. I copied the string "- -" and put code around it to see if it was equal to "-\u00a0-"`. It return false
  3. I copied the string "- -" and put code around it to see if it was equal to "-\u0020-"`. It return true

It's not the end of the world but it sure tripped me up for a while.

Unicode-A0-vs-20
Unicode-A0-vs-201448×1806 149 KB

2

Thanks for reporting it. The team created an internal issue to fix.

3

Hi! Browser developer here, thanks for reporting this! We format dates, string and other for display, so we can't guarantee the the output is in its raw format. So we won't make any changes in browser.

4

It seems to me, if somebody put in a non-breaking space, they really don't want wrapping to occur there. So, if you take it out, then it could wrap, which is not what is (presumably) intended.