[reportlab-users] treatment of space characters

[Richard Galka]

I should have mentioned that we are using the simpleWrap method of reportlab.lib.utils (RL 2.4), which provides the same result as Paragraph.wrap for height. In our case, even though the wrap/simpleWrap identifies a height of '0', our paragraph class actually draws on the canvas with a positive size.

-- Richard 

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Galka 
Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2011 11:20 AM
To: 'reportlab-users at lists2.reportlab.com'
Subject: RE: [reportlab-users] treatment of space characters

I've noticed this as well. Likely not the best solution, but a quick solution for determining height when your input has blank lines is to substitute a character for the blank line when performing your height check. 

Ie: 
for text in texts:
    if not text.strip():
        check_height('x')   # x is dummy character to replace blank line
    else: 
        check_height(text)


This will result in each of your samples providing '12' as the result. 

Hope this helps,

Richard Galka
Secure Software Analyst
Seccuris Inc.
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Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2011 02:16:36 -0800
From: Chris Jerdonek <chris.jerdonek at gmail.com>
Subject: [reportlab-users] treatment of space characters
To: reportlab-users at lists2.reportlab.com
Message-ID:
	<AANLkTi=f9LxtM0AraEbLpo+NM18sKSdL-t8vr=GStxGa at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

I'm looking for a string that takes up space but is invisible for
passing into a Paragraph -- i.e. so the paragraph looks empty but has
positive height.  The string "&nbsp;" seems to work for this.

While experimenting with this, I noticed some unexpected behavior.
Both spaces and non-breaking spaces seem to "take up space" when
encoded as HTML entities, and neither takes up space otherwise:

def check_height(text):
    para = Paragraph(text, style)
    height = para.wrap(300, 300)[1]
    print "%s: %s" % (repr(text), height)

texts = [u"spaces:", u" ", u"&#x20;", u"\u0020",
         u"non-breaking spaces:", u"&nbsp;", u"&#xa0;", u"\u00A0"]

for text in texts:
    check_height(text)

This gives--

u'spaces:': 12
u' ': 0
u'&#x20;': 12
u' ': 0
u'non-breaking spaces:': 12
u'&nbsp;': 12
u'&#xa0;': 12
u'\xa0': 0

Unless I'm doing something wrong, it seems like all strings in the
first group should yield 0 and all strings in the second 12.

--Chris
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