Invisible character treated as word?

[David Epstein]

Thanks for the helpful responses on this question. A complication is that while I want to get rid of invisible characters that cause seeming-numbers not to be numbers, I don't want to exclude all non-numbers from my table. But since it seems that fonts and systems will differ as to which characters are actually invisible, I will need to purge even harmless visible characters. So my current plan is to use this function:

function scrubbedText txt

-- For tab-delimited data, replace possibly invisible characters with a space; and then

-- remove leading and trailing spaces from each cell

  repeat for each char k in txt

    if charToNum(k) > 31 or charToNum(k) < 127 then put k after hold

    else put space after hold

  end repeat

  set itemDelimiter to tab

  repeat for each line k in hold

    repeat for each item i in k

      put word 1 to -1 of i & tab after k2

    end repeat

    put return into char -1 of k2

    put k2 after hold2

    put empty into k2

  end repeat

  return hold2

end scrubbedText

If anyone sees a way to do this without stepping through each character, or without excluding non-standard visible characters, suggestions are welcome.

David Epstein