title: MySQL: whitespace character in field is not actually whitespace. What is it?
body: <p>I have a string in a field in a MySQL table.</p>
  
  <p>It is VARCHAR, the table encoding is utf8.</p>
  
  <p>The content of the field is <code>one two three</code></p>
  
  <p>If I run <code>select * from table where content like '%one two%';</code> the row is returned.<br>
  However, if I run <code>update table set content = REPLACE(content, " ", "+;;");</code> then the result is <code>one two+;;three</code>.</p>
  
  <p>So, what is that first "whitespace" character?</p>
  
  <p>I'm using this table with a Ruby on Rails app.  Ruby doesn't recognize it as a whitespace character either. (e.g. if I split the string on " ", it doesn't split on the first space)</p>
  
  <p>Any idea what's going on?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>