Are non-breaking space characters just ignored in AE's text engine?

[A. Cobb]

I know you can explicitly set a space to "no break" using the character palette, but I need to set non-breaking spaces using expressions. Problem is, it sure looks like AE just treats non-breaking spaces like regular old spaces and breaks on them anyway when laying out paragraph text. Is there a simple solution to this, a setting I'm missing maybe? I can work around it with a character value animator, but it doesn't seem like this should be needed, right?

[ShiveringCactus]

It looks like After Effects doesn't tag the space, but instead tags the two words either side of the non-breaking space.  I took a quick look, but can't spot what that tag is via expressions.

When I made my tutorial for resizing a text box, I denoted line breaks with the '|' symbol and then replaced them after my code with line breaks.  So my text midway looked like "the|Quick|brown|fox|jumps|over|the|lazy|dog.  This gave me a bit more control.  

Depending what you're trying to do with your expression, could you start by splitting the text into an array and adding a different symbol at the point where you want a non-breaking space?

This code below splits the text by spaces and reassembles it, but adds in a symbol after the 4th word instead of a space.

var myArray = text.sourceText.split(' ');
txt = '';
for (var i = 0; i< myArray.length; i++) {
    txt += myArray[i];
    if (i == 4) {
        txt += '|';
    } else {
        txt += ' ';
    }

}
txt;

[A. Cobb]

Yeah, I have been doing something similar, except uisng a regular expression and the replace() function to insert a placeholder character, then changing it back to a space with a text animator. It's just annoying that it has to be this complicated.