From: "Terje Slettebø"

Hm, just now, I sent a reply to a similar problem report at Boost-Users list, about why whitespace skipping is turned off in the new lexical_cast version. It was to avoid having things like "lexical_caststd::string(' '); // Space character" work, which used to throw an exception.

I meant it was to avoid having it throw an exception, in other words, to _have_ it work. Terje