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A figure space or numeric space [1] is a typographic unit equal to the size of a single numerical digit. Its size can fluctuate somewhat depending on which font is being used. This is the preferred space to use in numbers. It has the same width as a digit and keeps the number together for the purpose of line breaking. [2]
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).
Web markup languages such as XML and HTML treat whitespace characters specially, including space characters, for programmers' convenience. One or more space characters read by conforming display-time processors of those markup languages are collapsed to 0 or 1 space, depending on their semantic context.
Character encodings such as Unicode provide spaces of several widths, which are encoded using distinct numeric code points. For example, Unicode U+0020 is the "normal" space character, but U+00A0 adds the meaning that a new line should not be started there, while U+2003 represents a space with a fixed width of one em.
In SGML, HTML and XML documents, the logical constructs known as character data and attribute values consist of sequences of characters, in which each character can manifest directly (representing itself), or can be represented by a series of characters called a character reference, of which there are two types: a numeric character reference and a character entity reference.
HTML and XML provide ways to reference Unicode characters when the characters themselves either cannot or should not be used. A numeric character reference refers to a character by its Universal Character Set/Unicode code point, and a character entity reference refers to a character by a predefined name. A numeric character reference uses the ...
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A numeric character reference in HTML refers to a character by its Universal Character Set/Unicode code point, and uses the format &#nnnn; or &#xhhhh; where nnnn is the code point in decimal form, and hhhh is the code point in hexadecimal form. The x must be lowercase in XML documents.