Why are spaces removed from the disk serial number?

[Phillip Susi]

Cetnerowski, Adam wrote:
> The serial number for sdb does look fishy and it could be interacting
> strangely with the library isspace() function used to strip out the
> whitespace (if some of the strange characters are control characters).
> This may be the reason why the raid set is recognized under Windows.

The question is, should the whitespace even be stripped?  If the disk 
has a space in its serial number, then shouldn't it be recorded in the 
metadata with the space?  If the space is supposed to be stripped then I 
can see the isspace() behaving incorrectly on control characters, but it 
seems to me that if the disk reports a space, the metadata should have a 
space in it as well.