student answers get spaces normalized

[Alex-Jordan]

In main:

pg/macros/core/PGbasicmacros.pl

Line 406 in 9cefdf9

$answer_value =~ s/\s+/ /g; ## remove excessive whitespace from student answer

(and at roughly the same line number in develop)

successive spaces from a student input are condensed to a single space. It might be undesirable to actually change the student's input in any way. In an exercise where this was discovered, an answer was an encrypted string using an alphabet that included the space character. With a particular seed, the answer happened to have two adjacent space characters. But because of this collapsing behavior, there was no way for the student to get it right.

I confess I cannot think of other situations where consecutive spaces would be desired, but in principle it just seems wrong to change the student's input like this.

A related issue is that even if you comment out the referenced line the "entered" string in feedback still collapses it down to one string.