how to document a single space character within a string in reST/Sphinx?

Question

I've gotten lost in an edge case of sorts. I'm working on a conversion of some old plaintext documentation to reST/Sphinx format, with the intent of outputting to a few formats (including HTML and text) from there. Some of the documented functions are for dealing with bitstrings, and a common case within these is a sentence like the following: Starting character is the blank " " which has the value 0.

I tried writing this as an inline literal the following ways: Starting character is the blank `` `` which has the value 0. or Starting character is the blank :literal:` ` which has the value 0. but there are a few problems with how these end up working:

1. reST syntax objects to a whitespace immediately inside of the literal, and it doesn't get recognized.
2. The above can be "fixed"--it looks correct in the HTML () and plaintext (" ") output--with a non-breaking space character inside the literal, but technically this is a lie in our case, and if a user copied this character, they wouldn't be copying what they expect.
3. The space can be wrapped in regular quotes, which allows the literal to be properly recognized, and while the output in HTML is probably fine (" "), in plaintext it ends up double-quoted as "" "".
4. In both 2/3 above, if the literal falls on the wrap boundary, the plaintext writer (which uses textwrap) will gladly wrap inside the literal and trim the space because it's at the start/end of the line.

I feel like I'm missing something; is there a good way to handle this?

Answer 1

Try using the unicode character codes. If I understand your question, this should work.

Here is a "|space|" and a non-breaking space (|nbspc|)

.. |space| unicode:: U+0020 .. space
.. |nbspc| unicode:: U+00A0 .. non-breaking space

You should see:

Here is a “ ” and a non-breaking space ( )