Dropped spaces in htmlText

[David Epstein]

With an empty field 1 in the topStack, type these two commands into the
message box:

put space & numToChar(7) & "a" into fld 1
set the htmlText of line 2 of fld 1 to the htmlText of line 1 of fld 1

Conclusion:  An initial space is lost in the translation.  This seems to
happen if the character immediately following the space is something that
the htmlText code describes with an initial ampersand and a couple of other
characters--e.g., a tab character or a non-breaking space--rather than some
character that appears as itself in the htmlText code.  To see what's
happened, type into the message box:

put the htmlText of line 1 of fld 1 into line 3 of fld 1
put the htmlText of line 2 of fld 1 into line 4 of fld 1

I can work around the practical problem this posed for me, but am wondering
if there is a good reason for this behavior, and if there are other
anomalies that make the htmlText an unreliable way to reproduce strings.

David Epstein