[Libreoffice-bugs] [Bug 107788] list box ignores spaces

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107788

--- Comment #9 from Howard Johnson <BridgeportContractor at gmail.com> ---
(In reply to Alex Thurgood from comment #1)
> ... databases that
> accepted beginning spaces as valid data entry input even when part of a
> further string...

Thanks Alex, and this makes no sense, and is not the way databases like MySQL,
Posgres, Dbase, Access, etc., work.  So while there might be valid arguments
for rejecting my improvement suggestion, this can't be one of them.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

A data cell as just that, data.  It's not text, but just more generally data,
to be used for whatever the database developer sees fit.  


Let me give you just one example:

Often I have a minor and major category.  For example, in a shopping list I
have items to get, and each item has an associated category.

But this category is composed of a major and minor category.  To make this easy
to type, I give my major categories a single letter, e.g. g = groceries, b =
building materials, ...  then for the category lookup I can have 

g apples (grocery)
b 2x4s (building materials)

So with only a three keystrokes I can select an item, and it makes sense.  And
I can also see what the g or b refer to, via the concatenated suffix in parens,
e.g. (grocery).

Now as for leading spaces, sometimes it also make sense to have that major
category missing but still selectable, like for miscellaneous items, for
example, 

" plants (for the garden)".

Again with just two keystrokes, " p" I can select this item.

So keeping the ability to use leading spaces, is very much a part of modern
databases.  If you want you can trim spaces when working with text, depending
on what you're doing.


Of course there are many other reasons to allow leading spaces in data, like
what if you suck in a whole bunch of text lines and then want to sort them to
find the ones with leading spaces, or a certain number of leading spaces.

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