"White space" is a category of (ASCII) characters originally defined by a
standard library used by programmers in the "C" language.  It includes not
only the "space" character but also the "tab" and the "new line" sequence
(which, on various systems, consists of "carriage return" or "line feed" or
both in a specific order).  All of these exist only to separate the
meaningful bits of text, syntactically and/or visually, and carry no other
meaning themselves.
  In many (but not all!) languages, any sequence of "white space" characters
can be replaced by a single "space" character without changing the meaning
of the text; in some cases, that final remaining "space" can also be
eliminated.  A proper "parser" (input interpreter) should treat all such
sequences as if they were a single "space" character, and so I infer that
the parser code in Avast is broken in this respect.

David Gillett


On 23 Nov 2005 at 0:59, Venkat Viswanathan wrote:

> Peter Shkabara's post (clipped):---
> <<<<  Apparently, a white space sequence triggers this.>>>.
>
> I have read about "white space" elsewhere also and shall appreciate if
> I can be enlightened on this. TIA and good day to all----Venkat

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