Reserving whitespace characters (and possibly other characters)

[ben221199]

In #64, @Stebalien suggested using space (\x20) for base 45, but it ended up using R. With this issue I want to open a discussion on reserving whitespace characters (and possibly others), because I don't think it is a good practise to use those.

Where spaces in the middle of a string do not create a big issue, other than "Does these two parts belong to the same code?", whitespaces on the start and end of the code will do. Why? Because many systems, even our brain sometimes, have trimming functions. If I copy a code to my browser URL bar to remove markup, the spaces on the start and end are gone. If you send a code inside HTML/XML tags? Gone. In my opinion, using these characters is very bad practise.

Which characters would be nominated?

In the ASCII block at least:

• 0x09 / \t (Tab)
• 0x0A / \n (New line)
• 0x0B / \v (Vertical tab)
• 0x0D / \r (Cariage return)
• 0x20 / (Space)
• 0x7F / � (Escape)
• (Maybe we should even exclude the whole control block: 0x00 - 0x1F)

In the extended ASCII block at least:

• 0xA0 /   (No break space)
• 0xAD / ­ (Soft hyphen)
• (Maybe we should even exclude the whole control block: 0x80 - 0x9F)