Re: unexpected character used as group separator by to_char

On 10 Mar 2021, at 16:24, Alvaro Herrera wrote:

> That space (0xe280af) is U+202F, which appears to be used for French
> and
> Mongolian languages (exclusively?). It is quite possible that in the
> future some other language will end up using some different whitespace
> character, possibly breaking any code you write today -- the use of
> U+202F appears to be quite recent.
>
Drifting off topic a little. That a proper code point for things that
will benefit from the whitespace but should still stay together.
Also it’s not that new, added in 1999 —
https://codepoints.net/U+202F
The other use case is between the number and its ISO symbol e.g.,
20 °C — and the non-breaking form is important here
As for who uses a thin space in money… it is a normal in European
notation — https://www.languageediting.com/format-numbers-eu-vs-us/
And the thin space is part of the international standard for breaking up
large numbers (from 1948), specifically no dots or commas should be used
in this role. The dot or comma is only to be used for the decimal point!
All of which just highlights problems in localisation and begs the
question whether there is an ISO locale setting — it should work
everywhere ;)

Gavan Schneider
——
Gavan Schneider, Sodwalls, NSW, Australia
Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a
well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and
wrong.
— H. L. Mencken, 1920