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A whitespace character is a character data element that represents white space when text is rendered for display by a computer. For example, a space character (U+0020 SPACE, ASCII 32) represents blank space such as a word divider in a Western script. A printable character results in output when rendered, but a whitespace character does not ...
A second common application of non-breaking spaces is in plain text file formats such as SGML, HTML, TeX and LaTeX, whose rendering engines are programmed to treat sequences of whitespace characters (space, newline, tab, form feed, etc.) as if they were a single character (but this behavior can be overridden).
Whitespace is a commonly used concept for a typographic effect. Basically it covers invisible characters that have a spacing effect in rendered text. It includes spaces, tabs, and new line formatting controls. In Unicode, such a character has the property set "WSpace=yes". In version 16.0, there are 25 whitespace characters.
Many trim functions have an optional parameter to specify a list of characters to trim, instead of the default whitespace characters. For example, PHP and Python allow this optional parameter, while Pascal and Java do not. With Common Lisp's string-trim function, the parameter (called character-bag) is required.
In computer programming, indentation describes formatting source code with whitespace to the left of code text – often to visually show that a sequence of code lines is syntactically a code block. Typically, the lines of a block are aligned with an amount of white space that indicates the block's depth in the hierarchical structure of the code.
In this context, whitespace and newline characters are not counted as delimiters. In the examples, the symbol ~ represents the comment; and, the symbols surrounding it are understood by the interpreters/compilers as the delimiters.
In HTML and XML, a numeric character reference refers to a character by its Universal Character Set/Unicode code point, and uses the format: &#xhhhh;. or &#nnnn; where the x must be lowercase in XML documents, hhhh is the code point in hexadecimal form, and nnnn is the code point in decimal form.
In contrast, a character entity reference refers to a character by the name of an entity which has the desired character as its replacement text. The entity must either be predefined (built into the markup language) or explicitly declared in a Document Type Definition (DTD). The format is the same as for any entity reference: &name;