tree - Troubleshooting

Problem:

When copying the result of a tree command into a text editor, it may happen that artifacts appear instead of space character. For instance, in Pycharm, copying this output from the Terminal

.
└── mychart
    ├── Chart.yaml
    ├── charts
    │   └── mysubchart
    │       ├── Chart.yaml
    │       ├── charts
    │       ├── templates
    │       │   └── configmap.yaml
    │       └── values.yaml
    ├── templates
    │   ├── _helpers.tpl
    │   └── configmap.yaml
    └── values.yaml

into Pycharm, it looks like this

.

└── mychart

├── Chart.yaml

├── charts

│ NBSP NBSP └── mysubchart

│ NBSP NBSP ├── Chart.yaml

│ NBSP NBSP ├── charts

│ NBSP NBSP ├── templates

│ NBSP NBSP │ NBSP NBSP └── configmap.yaml

│ NBSP NBSP └── values.yaml

├── templates

│ NBSP NBSP ├── _helpers.tpl

│ NBSP NBSP └── configmap.yaml

└── values.yaml

Cause:

The artifact is a non-breaking space character, a specialized version of a regular space, which prevents line breaks. Apparently, tree has been using it since very early on and the problem only now arises due to some editors printing them. In Unicode they are defined as U+00a0, whereas the regular space is defined as U+0020. In the editor, there is no mechanism to replace those characters and most fonts have display character associated to it, which leads the the obscure output (NSBP actually stands for, non-breaking space).

Solution:

Search for [\u00A0] characters in the document (regex search must be active) and replace each match with a single space character.