Whitespace

Whitespace refers to {{Glossary("Character", "characters")}} which are used to provide horizontal or vertical space between other characters. Whitespace is often used to separate tokens in {{Glossary("HTML")}}, {{Glossary("CSS")}}, {{Glossary("JavaScript")}}, and other computer languages.

Whitespace characters and their usage vary among languages.

In HTML

The Infra Living Standard defines five characters as "{{Glossary("ASCII")}} whitespace": U+0009 TAB, U+000A LF, U+000C FF, U+000D CR, and U+0020 SPACE.

In JavaScript

The ECMAScript Language Specification defines several Unicode code points as "white space": U+0009 CHARACTER TABULATION <TAB>, U+000B LINE TABULATION <VT>, U+000C FORM FEED <FF>, U+0020 SPACE <SP>, U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE <NBSP>, U+FEFF ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE <ZWNBSP>, and any other Unicode "Space_Separator" code points <USP>.

See also

• Whitespace character (Wikipedia)
• How whitespace is handled by HTML, CSS, and in the DOM
• {{cssxref("white-space")}}
• Specifications
  • ASCII whitespace spec
  • ECMAScript Language Specification
• Related glossary terms:
  • {{Glossary("Character")}}