compilation error with attribute access

[loveencounterflow]

i'm feeling a little bit stupid here but i really tried hard to make sure i'm not reporting a ghost. thing is, when i write

d[ 'a' ][ 'b' ][ 'c' ]

i get (using coffeescript 1.7.1 and coffee -c foo.coffee)

error: unexpected 'c'
d[ 'a' ][ 'b' ][ 'c' ]
                 ^^^

when i do the same on http://www.compileonline.com/try_coffeescript_online.php i get

main.coffee:2:18: error: unexpected STRING
d[ 'a' ][ 'b' ][ 'c' ]
                 ^^^

even worse,

x = d[ 'a' ][ 'b' ]
x[ 'c' ]

gives the same error. what's going on here?

[xyrius]

obj=
a:
b:
c: 'hi!'

console.log obj['a']['b']['c']

works fine for me on coffee 1.7.1

On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 12:31 PM, loveencounterflow <
[email protected]> wrote:

i'm feeling a little bit stupid here but i really tried hard to make sure
i'm not reporting a ghost. thing is, when i write

d[ 'a' ][ 'b' ][ 'c' ]

i get (using coffeescript 1.7.1 and coffee -c foo.coffee)

error: unexpected 'c'
d[ 'a' ][ 'b' ][ 'c' ]
^^^

when i do the same on
http://www.compileonline.com/try_coffeescript_online.php i get

main.coffee:2:18: error: unexpected STRING
d[ 'a' ][ 'b' ][ 'c' ]
^^^

even worse,

x = d[ 'a' ][ 'b' ]
x[ 'c' ]

gives the same error. what's going on here?

—
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#3560.

[loveencounterflow]

i believe i found the culprit—it's a non-breaking space character that i had inadvertently inserted by hitting Altgr-Space instead of Space on my keyboard. you may verify that by copying and inspecting the [ 'c' ] part from the above code.

i still think it's a bug, because

• writing d[ 'x' ] with U+00A0 instead of U+0020 for the first space character causes error: unexpected 'x' with CoffeeScript 1.7.1, but
• d[ 0 ] does not cause an error.

this behavior is problematic because

• it is inconsistent, and
• the error message is misleading—if there is a problem with d[ 'x' ], it's the space character, not the string literal.

i suggest to either

• make U+00A0 and U+0020 behave 100% identical, or
• make U+00A0 illegal for indentation and inter-token spacing.

i favor the second solution: outside of string literals, indentation and spacing between tokens should only consist of U+0020; otherwise, an compile-time error with a message like 'illegal whitespace character found on line...' should be raised.

[Delapouite]

On a side note, if you're a vim user you could emphasise these guilty chars with something like :
set listchars=nbsp:•

[lydell]

Fixed by #3774.

[loveencounterflow]

@Delapouite definitely helps, i found out using syntax hiliting in the editor.