unbreakable space
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In
word processing A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no conse ...
and digital typesetting, a non-breaking space, , also called NBSP, required space, hard space, or fixed space (though it is not of fixed width), is a
space character In computer programming, whitespace is any character or series of characters that represent horizontal or vertical space in typography. When rendered, a whitespace character does not correspond to a visible mark, but typically does occupy an area ...
that prevents an automatic line break at its position. In some formats, including
HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaSc ...
, it also prevents consecutive
whitespace character In computer programming, whitespace is any character or series of characters that represent horizontal or vertical space in typography. When rendered, a whitespace character does not correspond to a visible mark, but typically does occupy an area ...
s from collapsing into a single space. Non-breaking space characters with other widths also exist.


Uses and variations

Despite having layout and uses similar to those of whitespace, it differs in contextual behavior.


Non-breaking behavior

Text-processing software typically assumes that an automatic line break may be inserted anywhere a space character occurs; a non-breaking space prevents this from happening (provided the software recognizes the character). For example, if the text "100 km" will not quite fit at the end of a line, the software may insert a line break between "100" and "km". An editor who finds this behavior undesirable may choose to use a non-breaking space between "100" and "km". This guarantees that the text "100 km" will not be broken: if it does not fit at the end of a line, it is moved in its entirety to the next line.


Non-collapsing behavior

A second common application of non-breaking spaces is in
plain text In computing, plain text is a loose term for data (e.g. file contents) that represent only characters of readable material but not its graphical representation nor other objects (floating-point numbers, images, etc.). It may also include a limit ...
file formats such as SGML,
HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaSc ...
,
TeX Tex may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr. Entertainment * ''Tex'', the Italian ...
and
LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...
, whose rendering engines are programmed to treat sequences of
whitespace characters In computer programming, whitespace is any character or series of characters that represent horizontal or vertical space in typography. When rendered, a whitespace character does not correspond to a visible mark, but typically does occupy an are ...
(space, newline, tab,
form feed A page break is a marker in an electronic document that tells the document interpreter that the content which follows is part of a new page. A page break causes a form feed to be sent to the printer during spooling of the document to the printer. ...
, etc.) as if they were a single character (but this behavior can be overridden). Such "collapsing" of whitespace allows the author to neatly arrange the source text using line breaks, indentation and other forms of spacing without affecting the final typeset result. In contrast, non-breaking spaces are not merged with neighboring whitespace characters when displayed and can therefore be used by an author to simply insert additional visible space in the resulting output without using spans styled with peculiar values of the CSS "white-space" property. Conversely, indiscriminate use (see the recommended use in style guides), in addition to a normal space, gives extraneous space in the output.


Width variation

Other non-breaking variants, defined in Unicode: :It was introduced in Unicode 3.0 for Mongolian, to separate a suffix from the word stem without indicating a word boundary. It is also required for big
punctuation Punctuation (or sometimes interpunction) is the use of spacing, conventional signs (called punctuation marks), and certain typographical devices as aids to the understanding and correct reading of written text, whether read silently or aloud. An ...
in French where it is called and sometimes inaccurately referred to as "double punctuation" (before ;, ?, !, », › and after «, ‹; today often also before :), in
Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
(before em dash €”, and in German between multi-part abbreviations (e.g. "''z.B.''", "''d.h.''", "''v.l.n.r.''"). When used with Mongolian, its width is usually one third of the normal space; in other contexts, its width is about 70% of the normal space but may resemble that of the
thin space In typography, a thin space is a space character whose width is usually or of an em. It is used to add a narrow space, such as between nested quotation marks or to separate glyphs that interfere with one another. It is not as narrow as the hai ...
(U+2009), at least with some fonts. Also starting from release 34 of Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) the NNBSP is used in numbers as thousands group separator for French and Spanish locale. :Produces a space equal to the figure (0–9) characters. :Encoded in Unicode since version 3.2. The word-joiner does not produce any space and prohibits a line break at its position.


Example

On browsers, resizing the window will demonstrate the effect of non-breaking spaces on the texts below. To show the non-breaking effect of the non-breaking space, the following words have been separated with non-breaking spaces:
Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet Consectetur Adipiscing Elit Sed Do Eiusmod Tempor Incididunt Ut Labore Et Dolore Magna Aliqua Ut Enim Ad Minim Veniam Quis Nostrud Exercitation Ullamco Laboris Nisi Ut Aliquip Ex Ea Commodo Consequat Duis Aute
To show the non-collapsing behavior of the non-breaking space, the following words have been separated with an increasing number of non-breaking spaces:
Lorem Ipsum  Dolor   Sit    Amet     Consectetur      Adipiscing       Elit        Sed         Do          Eiusmod           Tempor            Incididunt             Ut              Labore               Et                Dolore                 Magna                  Aliqua                   Ut                    Enim                     Ad                      Minim
In contrast, the following words are separated with ordinary spaces:
Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet Consectetur Adipiscing Elit Sed Do Eiusmod Tempor Incididunt Ut Labore Et Dolore Magna Aliqua Ut Enim Ad Minim Veniam Quis Nostrud Exercitation Ullamco Laboris Nisi Ut Aliquip Ex Ea Commodo Consequat Duis Aute


Encodings

In Unicode, the
Byte order mark The byte order mark (BOM) is a particular usage of the special Unicode character, , whose appearance as a magic number at the start of a text stream can signal several things to a program reading the text: * The byte order, or endianness, of t ...
(BOM), U+FEFF, may be interpreted as a "zero width no-break space", but is a deprecated alternative to word joiner (U+2060).


Keyboard entry methods

It is rare for national or international standards on
keyboard layout A keyboard layout is any specific physical, visual or functional arrangement of the keys, legends, or key-meaning associations (respectively) of a computer keyboard, mobile phone, or other computer-controlled typographic keyboard. is the actua ...
s to define an input method for the non-breaking space. An exception is the Finnish multilingual keyboard, accepted as the national standard SFS 5966 in 2008. According to the SFS setting, the non-breaking space can be entered with the key combination
AltGr AltGr (also Alt Graph) is a modifier key found on many computer keyboards (rather than a second Alt key found on US keyboards). It is primarily used to type characters that are not widely used in the territory where sold, such as foreign c ...
+
Space Space is the boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events have relative position and direction. In classical physics, physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually cons ...
.. Drafts of the Finnish multilingual keyboard. Typically, authors of keyboard drivers and application programs (e.g.,
word processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicated to the function, but current ...
s) have devised their own
keyboard shortcut computing, a keyboard shortcut also known as hotkey is a series of one or several keys to quickly invoke a software program or perform a preprogrammed action. This action may be part of the standard functionality of the operating system or ...
s for the non-breaking space. For example: Apart from this, applications and environments often have methods of entering unicode entities directly via their code point, e.g. via the Alt Numpad input method. (Non-breaking space has code point 255 decimal (FF hex) in codepage 437 and codepage 850 and code point 160 decimal (A0 hex) in codepage 1252.)


See also

* Hyphens in computing, for information about hard and non-breaking hyphens *
List of XML and HTML character entity references 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 ...
* * * * * ** , for applications ** , a non-spacing break * * *


Notes


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Non-Breaking Space Control characters Whitespace Unicode formatting code points