Users posting spaced-out code with funny characters in

Stream: general

[Kevin Buzzard]

I have noticed recently that users (perhaps only Windows users?) are posting code with spaces between every line and also with funny characters instead of spaces. The first two examples I saw were with (competent) users posting code directly to me in DMs but now I've seen an example in the wild here. If I "Copy code" and then paste into a local VS code then I get the following mess:

spacing.png

Can anyone diagnose what's going on?

[Junyan Xu]

Maybe Zulip's relative new pasting with formatting is to blame? I've also seen the extra blank lines when pasting into Obsidian, for example.

[Markus Himmel]

The yellow boxes are non-breaking spaces (UTF-8 c2 a0), and the double newlines are just line feeds (0a 0a). An internet search turns up https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/88178, but I'm not sure if that's the same problem.

[Yaël Dillies]

Usually this happens when people post code outside of ``````. Is this the case for you here?

[Markus Himmel]

The comment "In recent releases, I'm finding single spaces are copied as spaces, but double spaces are copied as a non-breaking space and a space." from the linked issue definitely matches what we're observing.

[Kevin Buzzard]

Yaël Dillies said:

Usually this happens when people post code outside of ``````. Is this the case for you here?

Clicking on "View original message" in the example I linked to shows that the user correctly used ``` s.

[Eric Wieser]

I would guess this is also related to a Zulip change; as I understand it the clipboard can contain multiple versions of the copied data (e.g. rich and plain text), and perhaps Zulip is using the former more often now.