[bug #60803] tr request does not warn when it can't translate an input space

[G. Branden Robinson]

URL:
  <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?60803>

                 Summary: tr request does not warn when it can't translate an
input space
                 Project: GNU troff
            Submitted by: gbranden
            Submitted on: Sun 20 Jun 2021 06:04:03 AM UTC
                Category: Core
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: Warning/Suspicious behaviour
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
         Planned Release: None

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Details:

T. Kurt Bond and Oliver Corff noted an oddity with .tr on the groff mailing
list.

You can translate characters _to_ space with .tr, but not _from_ a space. 
While this may make sense for a syntactical and/or typographical perspective,
.tr is completely silent about this and it probably should not be.

"I fumbled with .tr after reading your mail and it seems how space is used as
a delimiter in general input processing prohibits it from being recognized as
a character which is recognized and accepted as an element of the input
character set by .tr.

In contrary, normal characters can be converted to spaces by .tr--just
consider the following example:


.tr n iI
This is a string.


I added the substitution pair iI in order a) to signal to .tr that the space
is a valid input and b) in order to have quick check whether .tr works as
expected with spaces in the chain of substitution pairs. It does."




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