A common source of frustration in debugging occurs when a piece of character data contains leading or trailing blank spaces. The line looks like it ends with the correct data, but in fact there are some exrta characters on the end that were not displayed by the terminal.

A bad solution to this problem is to make the space character visible, for example by displaying it as a small dot. This is annoying and inconvenient because it clutters the screen with many little dots.

The Visible EOL feature is an option you enable in a terminal emulation program such as xterm or eterm. When Visible EOL is enabled, the terminal puts a one-pixel tick mark at the end of every logical line displayed in the window. When you print out a string like xxxxxxxxxx<SPC><SPC><SPC> in the debugger, the tick is further to the right than it is with plain xxxxxxxxxx, so it's immediately obvious that there are trailing blanks in the data.

This is a very cheap solution to a small but pervasive problem.
-- dominus, Jul 06 2000

cat -e
-- jutta, Jul 06 2000


You could try turning on underlining. In Hyperterm at least, when cat'ing a file, tabs are not underlined, nor is the remainder of a line after a newline. When editing a file, however, the editor may have its own ideas about when to use blanks to erase things and when to use erase commands.
-- supercat, Jul 07 2000


I just go over my code in VI and use the "$" key to go to the end of the current line. I know there are ways to change control characters to be visible - but I do like your idea - it would make this much simpler to debug at a glance.
-- jefmjones, Sep 01 2001


Many physical terminals had an option to do this. I remember turning it on by mistake a few times.
-- wiml, Sep 01 2001



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