Perl HTML::TableExtract, nbsp and ASCII 160
I was trying to match tables with what looked like spaces in them, using HTML::TableExtract, but for some reason it wasn’t matching, using explicit $foo eq ’ ’ and $foo =~ /A\s*\z/.
After 30 minutes of banging my head against the wall, I found out that the spaces were actually in the source, and HTML::TableExtract unhelpfully changes them to their ASCII counterparts. This is not the standard ASCII code for space (which is 32), but freaky bizarro space 160.
What is even worse is that perl’s regex \s doesn’t even cover it.
So I was forced to do something disgusting like:
if (ord($foo) == 160) ...
