Somehow, I don't think replacing every nbsp with nothing is such a good idea. I'd leave a space in its place. Otherwise, you'd end up joining words into one, that should remain separate.

In theory, it's a better (= fewer possible nasty surprises) solution.

I see more possible nasty surprises. Can you elaborate?

I see more possible nasty surprises. Can you elaborate?

Huh? Can you elaborate?

The theoretical danger is that by matching individual bytes instead of characters, you might inadvertently match bytes that actually belong to other characters. And by changing just a few bytes instead of the whole sequence making up a character, you might even be creating invalid UTF8.

Of course, one of the reasons for the popularity of UTF8 (as opposed to Windows native "2 bytes for each character") is that it's resyncing, it's always possible to recognize start and continuation bytes for multibyte characters, so this problem isn't as stringent as it could have been using other multibyte character representations.

There are no whitespace characters with a character code of 128 or above, nbsp (160) is the only almost-whitespace character I know of in that situation. So for this particular application, you're probably in the clear.

Still, there's danger lurking in treating byte sequences in a different manner than intended — thus, treating UTF8 as a byte sequence.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use warnings;
use strict;

binmode(STDIN,":utf8");
binmode(STDOUT,":utf8");

while(<>)
{
# if you just want to get rid of non-breaking spaces, do this:
    tr/\xA0/ /;

# if you really want to change every kind of whitespace and every stri
+ng
# of two or more whitespace to a single space, do this instead:
    s/\s+/ /g;  # in utf8 strings, \s matches non-breaking space
    s/ $/\n/;   # (puts back the \n at the end of the line)

    print;
}
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# of two or more whitespace to a single space, do this instead: s/\s+/ /g; # in utf8 strings, \s matches non-breaking space I read this on a webpage somewhere, but for one reason or another, it did not produce the desired results. The binmode utf8 thing did not work either. Though more unpredictable, and for reasons I cannot completely explain, the byte mode solution was the only one I could get to produce the desired results.

but for one reason or another, it did not produce the desired results.

It would be neat if you could show a minimal self-contained example to demonstrate this. It could be you were still missing something simple, like you did binmode STDOUT, ":utf8"; but then actually read your input from some other file handle (e.g. ARGV), instead of actually piping or redirecting data to the script. And see what the results actually were could help as well.