title: how to document a single space character within a string in reST/Sphinx?
body: <p>I've gotten lost in an edge case of sorts. I'm working on a conversion of some old plaintext documentation to reST/Sphinx format, with the intent of outputting to a few formats (including HTML and text) from there. Some of the documented functions are for dealing with bitstrings, and a common case within these is a sentence like the following: <code>Starting character is the blank " " which has the value 0.</code></p>
  
  <p>I tried writing this as an inline literal the following ways: <code>Starting character is the blank `` `` which has the value 0.</code> or <code>Starting character is the blank :literal:` ` which has the value 0.</code> but there are a few problems with how these end up working:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>reST syntax objects to a whitespace immediately inside of the literal, and it doesn't get recognized.</li>
  <li>The above can be "fixed"--it <em>looks</em> correct in the HTML (<code></code>) and plaintext (<code>" "</code>) output--with a non-breaking space character inside the literal, but technically this is a lie in our case, and if a user copied this character, they wouldn't be copying what they expect.</li>
  <li>The space can be wrapped in regular quotes, which allows the literal to be properly recognized, and while the output in HTML is probably fine (<code>" "</code>), in plaintext it ends up double-quoted as <code>"" ""</code>.</li>
  <li>In both 2/3 above, if the literal falls on the wrap boundary, the plaintext writer (which uses <code>textwrap</code>) will gladly wrap inside the literal and trim the space because it's at the start/end of the line.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>I feel like I'm missing something; is there a good way to handle this?</p>