bug#34524: wc: word count incorrect when words separated only by no-break space

[vampyrebat]

$ wc --version
wc (GNU coreutils) 8.29
Packaged by Gentoo (8.29-r1 (p1.0))

The man page for wc states: "A word is a... sequence of characters delimited by 
white space."

But its concept of white space only seems to include ASCII white space.  U+00A0 
NO-BREAK SPACE, for instance, is not recognized.

If your terminal displays UTF-8 encoding:

printf 'how are\xC2\xA0you\n'

or if your terminal displays ISO 8859-1 encoding:

printf 'how are\xA0you\n'

the visible output of this printf is "how are you".  In either case, wc does 
not recognize the second space as white space, resulting in an incorrect word 
count:

$ printf 'how are\xC2\xA0you\n' | LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 wc -w
2
$ printf 'how are\xA0you\n' | LC_ALL=en_US.iso88591 wc -w
2