Leading spaces at the beginning of the next line are not ignored when using a backslash as a hard line break

[danjelalura]

Discussed in #618

^{Originally posted by danjelalura July 24, 2024}
Hello community,

This piece of text:

foo\
     bar

and this piece of text:

foo  
     bar

are represented differently in the DOM when parsed.

In the first case, a backslash is used as a hard line break and in the second case 2 spaces are used as a hard line break. Even though both of these representations of a hard line break are shown as HardLineBreak, for the first case, the spaces at the beginning of the next line are not ignored. The offsets however, disregard the whitespaces.

First case:

Document[0, 13]
      Paragraph[0, 13]
              Text[0, 3] chars:[0, 3, "foo"]
              HardLineBreak[3, 5]
              Text[10, 13] chars:[10, 13, "     bar"] 

Second case:

Document[0, 14]
      Paragraph[0, 14]
              Text[0, 3] chars:[0, 3, "foo"]
              HardLineBreak[3, 6]
              Text[11, 14] chars:[11, 14, "bar"] 

I am having a hard time understanding why this happens. This could potentially lead to issues when making use of the information provided by the above representation.
Thank you for your help!

[Kijimuna]

@vsch What seems suspicious in regards to that issue is that no "leading-space-gobbling" seems to happen in case of a backslash-hardline-break, in contrast to all other line breaks 🤔.