Method para.append_plain_text() trims whitespaces before text about odfdo

[jdum]

Hi, this is a beautiful bug ;-)
What I see:

• append°plain_text() does not trim the leading spaces (I can see them in the .xml file)
• however LibreOffice does remove the first space
• what the standard is saying seems quite strange:
• at https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/os/part3-schema/OpenDocument-v1.3-os-part3-schema.html#element-text_s
  it is clearly said :
  """"
  This element shall be used to represent the second and all following “ “ (U+0020, SPACE) characters in a sequence of “ “ (U+0020, SPACE) characters.

Note: It is not an error if the character preceding the element is not a white space character, but it is good practice to use this element only for the second and all following “ “ (U+0020, SPACE) characters in a sequence.
"""
However, the chapter juste before says something different (at 6.1.2 White Space Characters) :
(5)Leading “ “ (U+0020, SPACE) characters at the start of the resulting text and trailing SPACE characters at the end of the resulting text are removed.

And LibreOffice shall implement that rule (5). As a result you dont see your space. And moreover, when inserting a leading space in LO, it is translated into a text:s, thus complying with the 6.1.2 rules, but not exactly with the 6.1.3 definition of text:s

So, I will try to implement that in the same way as LibreOffice (and it seems correct to me that leading/trailing spaces are a special case)

[mlwesoly]

Thank you very much for the comprehensive answer. I will also read a bit more into this, because what i read from your quotes makes me wonder, why did a committee decide that leading space characters should be removed. Trailing ones I can understand. Anyway that is for another day, i thank you for having a look into this topic.

my current workaround looks like this, also splitting the one space at beginning and then adding a Spacer in form of the block length. ....let's just say, its working for me at the moment. But i know it is just a not beautiful solution.

_re_splitter = re.compile(r"(\n|\t|^ |  +)")
_re_space = re.compile(r"^  +$")
_re_space2 = re.compile(r"^ +$")

... lower in _plain_text_splitted

    continue
            if _re_space2.match(bloc):
                # follow ODF standard : n spaces => one space + spacer(n-1)
                # self.append(" ")
                elements.append(Spacer(len(bloc)))
                continue
            if _re_space.match(bloc):

[jdum]

The new version 3.9 should fix the bug

[mlwesoly]

I tried it and until now it works perfectly. Thank you very much!