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Concept
Whitespace character
Summary
In computer programming, whitespace is any character or series of characters that represent horizontal or vertical space in typography. When rendered, a whitespace character does not correspond to a visible mark, but typically does occupy an area on a page. For example, the common whitespace symbol (also ASCII 32) represents a blank space punctuation character in text, used as a word divider in Western scripts.
With many keyboard layouts, a whitespace character may be entered by pressing . Horizontal whitespace may also be entered on many keyboards with the key, although the length of the space may vary. Vertical whitespace may be input by typing , which creates a 'newline' code sequence in most programs. In some systems has a separate meaning but in others the two are conflated. Many early computer games used whitespace characters to draw a screen (e.g. Kingdom of Kroz).
The term "whitespace" is based on the appearance of the characters on ordinary paper. However, within an application, whitespace characters can be processed in the same way as any other character code and different programs may define their own semantics for the characters.
The table below lists the twenty-five characters defined as whitespace ("WSpace=Y", "WS") characters in the Unicode Character Database. Seventeen use a definition of whitespace consistent with the algorithm for bidirectional writing ("Bidirectional Character Type=WS") and are known as "Bidi-WS" characters. The remaining characters may also be used, but are not of this "Bidi" type.
Note: Depending on the browser and fonts used to view the following table, not all spaces may be displayed properly.
Unicode also provides some visible characters that can be used to represent various whitespace characters, in contexts where a visible symbol must be displayed:
Exact space
The Cambridge Z88 provided a special "exact space" (code point 160 aka 0xA0) (invokable by key shortcut ), displayed as "..." by the operating system's display driver. It was therefore also known as "dot space" in conjunction with BBC BASIC.
Official source
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