To help against some problems with unwanted   entities, i have an idea for a plugin.
I want to ask here for other people's opinion on it (and possibly tips on implementation).
The Problem:
There are a number of reasons why you can end up with unwanted  -entities (instead of normal spaces), see eg.
http://ckeditor.com/forums/CKEditor/Recommendations-for-how-to-deal-with-unwanted-nbsp-entities
Solution- Idea:
Manual removal of the nbsp's needs awareness of their existance first.
So i thought, there could be a plugin that
a)
adds a nbsp counter, similar as word/character-counter plugins
(or one could just extend one of these plugins)
b)
adds a button to temporarly highlight them (by replacing them with something like
<span style="border:2px solid red;"> </span>
on first button-click, and reverts the change on clicking again. similar to the BOLD-button.
if entities were found, it could offer to delete or remove them.
One problem would be, that you might need to disable editing during the highlighting, or you might end up saving even more unwanted stuff...
maybe a script could look for nbsp's constantly while you have the highlighting on. Then you just need to remember to turn it off again before saving the content.
Questions:
What do you think about the idea?
Do you see other / simpler solutions?
Do you see show-stoppers for the idea?
Any hints for plugins with similar functionality?
(I am not a coder. I guess i might be able to extend a word-count plugin with nbsp-count, but it'd take stoopidly long, other tasks would be even worse...)
Anyone with skills and appetite to work on it?