1232545 - Copy or cut and paste removes spaces within write window of Thunderbird

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Gary]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:42.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/42.0
Build ID: 20151029151421

Steps to reproduce:

I'm using Thunderbird 38.4.0

This is in regards to the "write" window or "message compose" window of Thunderbird (i.e. when writing a new email).

I always end sentences with two spaces following the period.  I'll use copy (or cut) and paste during editing to move text around.   Now, this is all within the write window (message compose) of Thunderbird.  That is, no text is copied from
anywhere else.

For example:

> Something.  Something else.  Something else.  (two spaces after the period)
> Or using lots of spaces:          x (that's ten spaces)

Copy (or cut) those two lines and paste them elsewhere within the same email text body, and the extra spaces are NOT preserved.


Now, I've read about people getting this same problem by copying from other windows (Notepad or whatever).  So I tried the following experiment:

Enter that example text (by hand) in both a Notepad window and in Thunderbird message compose ("write") window.  Then select and copy the text from one of those and paste into the other.  The idea is to isolate where the alteration is happening.  It seems to only happen when copying or cutting from within Thunderbird's compose window.




Actual results:

When pasting the example text (above), originally written and copied all within the Thunderbird message compose window, all instances of multiple spaces are reduced to just one space in the pasted text.

If pasting into the Notepad window, the same thing happens, all but one space is removed.

So, in both cases, the pasted text becomes:

> Something. Something else. Something else. (two spaces after the period)
> Or using lots of spaces: x (that's ten spaces)

Notice only one space remains after the periods and the colon.

Now, if the original text was copied from Notepad, then pasted into Thunderbird compose window, all the spaces ARE preserved.  We get the original text exactly:

> Something.  Something else.  Something else.  (two spaces after the period)
> Or using lots of spaces:          x (that's ten spaces)

Based on this experiment, it appears the alteration is happening in the copy or cut process of Thunderbird's message compose window, not during the paste process.



Expected results:

All spaces should be preserved.  The copy / cut and paste process should not alter the text in any way.

Comment 1

[Rainer Blome]

The above issue also occurs on my system, in both Thunderbird 38.6.0 and 38.5.x (the previous version, .1 or .3, I do not recall), Windows 8.1 32 bit.

Comment 2

[Rainer Blome]

There is at least one other affected user, see this forum thread:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=2989871

Comment 3

[Freek Dijkstra]

I have the same problem. I tried the addon https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/copy-plain-text-2/ to check if that changed the behaviour, but unfortunately it does not.

I'm using Thunderbird 38.6.0 on OS X.10.5, and use a plain text editor only. No markup whatsover.

Note that Thunderbird modifies text on the *copy* operation. As far as I can check, the *paste* operation leaves the text intact.

This is a weird bug. Why Thunderbird would modify spaces on copying, is beyond me.

Comment 4

[Freek Dijkstra]

I did some testing in which version of ThunderBird this problem occurs (using the OS X version with en_GB as language):

TB 31.8.0 - problem not yet present
TB 38.0.1 - problem occurs
TB 38.6.0 - problem occurs
TB 40.0b1 - problem occurs
TB 45.0b.1 - problem is fixed

Comment 5

[Freek Dijkstra]

This is a duplicate of #1193153

Comment 6

[Rainer Blome]

Freek, thanks for pointing to #1193153. There it says:
> This bug is fixed in Thunderbird 45 and later. TB 45 will be in the release channel from mid-March. You can try a beta version now: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/channel/

Note that the issue also occurs on Linux, Ubuntu 14 (I think) at least.