Spaces will not be removed

[David Nelson]

I thought I was getting the hang of this stuff but obviously not

 

file attached.  trying to remove spaces and they will not remove.  I know they are spaces because I can backspace one by one and they disappear.  But this is from clipboards sent in by my people which I cannot control.  I do not want to remove each space manually through 85 records.  I even unstored the calculations but it does not help.  I am losing my mind.  I tried both version 11 and 13 and neither will work.

Oh and I used script at first but same results.  I want to do this in script.

Untitled.fp7.zip

[comment]

I know they are spaces because I can backspace one by one and they disappear.

 

That's no reason to assume they are spaces; you can backspace one by one with any character, and they disappear. In fact, they are not spaces, but non-breaking spaces, so try:

 

Substitute ( copy ; Char ( 160 ) ; "" )

[Lee Smith]

It isn’t spaces, use the substitute function

 

 

Substitute ( copy ; "        " ; "" )

[doughemi]

To clarify,  Lee copied and pasted the non-break spaces from the original field into his Substitute function.  If you decide to do this, document this with a comment for future use. comment's (the responder in the thread) suggestion is kind of self-documenting.

[David Nelson]

Every response helped.  Using Comment's calculation, one space remained on some records in the batch and a few remained with Lee's example.  Seems I had both non-break and regular in some of them.  So I learned by the examples to make a regular space and create a calculation to find its code then I could use both in the substitution with code and even that I could copy a single character of the non break and copy single regular space and use those singly in the substitute.  

 

Doug you make a good point about documenting what they represent if copied.  I like using the code approach so it removes all of them singly and if a mix I can identify each type but I will still need to document what they are.  so Code 32 is regular space I found out.  I remember reading about hidden characters but it sure hit home here.  Thanks everyone for solving it for me.