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ASCII World

White space characters

White space characters - quick reference

Whitespace characters produce spacing or line breaks without visible glyphs. ASCII defines five: Space (32), Tab (9), Line Feed (10), Carriage Return (13), and Form Feed (12). Together they form the POSIX [:space:] character class used in regex.

Unicode adds many more: non-breaking space (U+00A0, the   in HTML), em space (U+2003), thin space (U+2009), zero-width space (U+200B), and others. These can cause subtle bugs - a non-breaking space looks identical to a regular space but does not match \x20 and will not split words in text processing. Browse all ASCII whitespace in the whitespace characters group or see how they appear on individual character pages.

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