Whitespace refers to which are used to provide horizontal or vertical space between other characters. Whitespace is often used to separate tokens in , , , and other computer languages.

Whitespace characters and their usage vary among languages.

In HTML

The Infra Living Standard defines five characters as “ 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 on Wikipedia

• Handling whitespace in CSS

• Specifications:

  • ASCII whitespace spec

  • ECMAScript Language Specification

Related glossary terms: