There are a few cases in which the un-visible blank character will cause
problem, but it is hard to detect since they are not visible.
One famous case is the '\t' character used by Make file, it is used to mark
the start of a command. If it is replace by blank space character, it does
not work, but you can not see the difference if you only look at the make file.
This kind of problem may get the newbies crazy.
Last week, I have encounter a similar issue, which is also caused by unnecessary
blank space.
As you may know, '\' is used as line-continuation when you have a very long line, e.g.
when you configure the class path for Java in a property file, you may have something like this.
classpath=/lib/A.jar;/lib/B.jar;\
/lib/C.jar;/lib/D.jar;\
/lib/E.jar;/lib/log4j.jar;\
/lib/F.jar;/lib/httpclient.jar;
But if you add extra blank space after the '\', then you can not get the complete
content of classpath. Because only when '\' is followed by a '\n' on Unix or '\r''\n'
on Windows, it will work as line-continuation ; otherwise, e.g '\' is followed by
' ''\n', the line is complete after the '\n', the content after that will be the start of
a new line.
Fortunately, it is easy to check this kind of extra blank space by using vi in Unix.
use command '$' to go to the end of line, if there is no extra blank space after '\',
the current position should be '\', if there are any blank space after '\', the current position
is after the '\'.