Non-breaking spaces not working correctly

[evilpixi]

https://imgur.com/xGH9jZC

A coworker using sublime text uses &nbsp characters for spaces.
If I remove the &nbsp characters it works fine.
Shouldn't it work anyways?

[dqsully]

No. The only "whitespace" characters in Hjson are space (0x20), tab (0x09), new line/line feed (0x0A) and carriage return (0x0D). When you use the non-breaking space character Hjson will treat it like text.

[evilpixi]

why? is this a design decision?

[sffc]

&nbsp (U+00A0) is not normally treated as an ignorable whitespace character; that's why it exists as a separate code point from U+0020. You can find a list of characters that Unicode considers ignorable in pattern syntax here:

http://unicode.org/L2/L2005/05012r-pattern.html

Unicode recommends effectively 9 ignorable characters:

0009..000D     # Cc   [5] <control-0009>..<control-000D>
0020           # Zs       SPACE
0085           # Cc       <control-0085>
200E..200F     # Cf   [2] LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK..RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK
2028           # Zl       LINE SEPARATOR
2029           # Zp       PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR

I think @dqsully's list of ASCII-range whitespace characters in common use is a reasonable set.