ASCII 160 or non-breaking space

Dear crappy developer,

please remember, that when you create tables in HTML that need to be opened in Excel, do not use non-breaking space ( ) inside the table cells.   is not rendered to normal space (ASCII 32), it is rendered to ASCII 160 – which Excel then faithfully stores as ASCII 160, meaning that even if (visible) cell content is a number, it is stored as a string in Excel.

And if that particular Excel worksheet is ever opened in an application that is not especially made to remove non-breaking space characters (99.99% of all applications aren’t), it will choke when attempting to convert the cell content into a number. And if you are dealing with legacy applications that you cannot change… guess what? You’re fucked.

Hopefully we’ll meet soon.

Sincerely yours,
axe-murdering mad bastard.