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.
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
The "Introduction to Applied Data Science" (I2ADS) course is aimed at students of all levels to train them in the core computer science software stack and techniques forming the pillars of open & repr
L'objectif de ce cours est d'introduire les étudiants à la pensée algorithmique, de les familiariser avec les fondamentaux de l'Informatique et de développer une première compétence en programmation (
FORCETOC In the written form of many languages, an indentation or indent is an empty space at the beginning of a line to signal the start of a new paragraph. Many computer languages have adopted this technique to designate "paragraphs" or other logical blocks in the program. For example, the following lines are indented, using between one and six spaces: This paragraph is indented by 1 space. This paragraph is indented by 3 spaces. This paragraph is indented by 6 spaces.
In computer programming, a free-form language is a programming language in which the positioning of characters on the page in program text is insignificant. Program text does not need to be placed in specific columns as on old punched card systems, and frequently ends of lines are insignificant. Whitespace characters are used only to delimit tokens, and have no other significance. Most free-form languages descend from ALGOL, including C, Pascal, and Perl. Lisp languages are free-form, although they do not descend from ALGOL.
The tab key (abbreviation of tabulator key or tabular key) on a keyboard is used to advance the cursor to the next tab stop. The word tab derives from the word tabulate, which means "to arrange data in a tabular, or table, form." When a person wanted to type a table (of numbers or text) on a typewriter, there was a lot of time-consuming and repetitive use of the space bar and backspace key. To simplify this, a horizontal bar was placed in the mechanism called the tabulator rack.