Gatsby: `gatsby-source-contentful` returns a string with a single whitespace character (`" "`) for empty "long text" fields

[mrseanbaines]

Description

gatsby-source-contentful returns a string with a single whitespace character (" ") for empty "long text" fields, rather than an empty string (""), or null like other fields. Seems to be fine and returns null for empty "short text" fields.

It looks like the problem stems is on this line, though not sure if this space is there for a reason or not 🤔 - haven't had time to investigate that thoroughly yet.

Steps to reproduce

1. Create new Gatsby project
2. Install and configure gatsby-source-contentful
3. Create an entry in Contentful with a "long text" field
4. Leave "long text" field empty
5. Run Gatsby site and query the entry/field in GraphiQL editor

Expected result

"description": null

is returned

Actual result

"description": {
  "description": " "
}

is returned

Environment

Run gatsby info --clipboard in your project directory and paste the output here.

  System:
    OS: macOS 10.15.2
    CPU: (8) x64 Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8279U CPU @ 2.40GHz
    Shell: 5.7.1 - /bin/zsh
  Binaries:
    Node: 10.16.2 - /var/folders/c6/zn3s5lkd09xf78n8tcylhyg00000gn/T/yarn--1578935140235-0.22327134046771624/node
    Yarn: 1.21.1 - /var/folders/c6/zn3s5lkd09xf78n8tcylhyg00000gn/T/yarn--1578935140235-0.22327134046771624/yarn
    npm: 6.13.4 - /usr/local/bin/npm
  Languages:
    Python: 2.7.16 - /usr/bin/python
  Browsers:
    Chrome: 79.0.3945.117
    Firefox: 72.0.1
    Safari: 13.0.4
  npmPackages:
    gatsby: 2.16.3 => 2.16.3 
    gatsby-image: 2.2.29 => 2.2.29 
    gatsby-plugin-react-helmet: 3.1.11 => 3.1.11 
    gatsby-plugin-segment-js: 3.0.1 => 3.0.1 
    gatsby-plugin-styled-components: 3.1.14 => 3.1.14 
    gatsby-plugin-typescript: 2.1.12 => 2.1.12 
    gatsby-source-contentful: 2.1.47 => 2.1.47 

[vladar]

@pieh Do you know why we have this? Looks pretty weird

[github-actions[bot]]

Hiya!

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[pieh]

So I tracked this down to https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/pull/1264/files#diff-02e206f053c7858936f4ee6d70bdecf0R68 (so it's been like that for a long time and wasn't changed since). As to why - this is lost in translation (at that point in time it was mostly Kyle working on code, so pull requests were not very detailed in explanations).

I think it should be safe to make it at least empty string instead of single whitespace (it should still be inferred as a string, so no regressions on that part). I suspect that schema inference back then had a lot more edge cases than we have now and we might have skip falsy values back then (which empty string is) and this was way to ensure that this is picked up as a string (?)

[pieh]

So I think we will accept PR that will change " " (single whitespace) to "" (empty string) fallback in https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/blob/1e2813ceb742a7ecdfb564084e0889cd4b3d748f/packages/gatsby-source-contentful/src/normalize.js#L224

If anyone is interested in working on that

[mrseanbaines]

Awesome! I can do that 🙌