Non-breaking space

Despite having layout and uses similar to those of whitespace, it differs in contextual behavior. Text-processing software generally assumes that an automatic line break may be inserted anywhere a space character occurs; a non-breaking space prevents this from happening, if it is supported by the software. To show the effect of the non-breaking space in text, the following words have been separated with non-breaking spaces. No matter the width of the window, no line breaks are displayed: By contrast, words separated with ordinary spaces will reflow as the window size changes: In this example, most spaces are non-breaking, but every third space is an ordinary breaking space. This shows how groups of words can be prevented from being divided across lines by automatic line breaks: ==Uses==

Numbers with units Text-processing software can divide expressions like "100 km" when they do not quite fit at the end of a line. A non-breaking space between "100" and "km" prevents this, and guarantees that "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. Many style guides recommend that numbers and the associated units not be split across lines; non-breaking spaces are used to ensure this. Spacing punctuation in French In French typography, non-breaking spaces are used before "high punctuation" (:, ;, ?, and !), on the interior side of guillemets (« and »), and before footnote references. In the case of ;, ?, !, and footnote references (unless enclosed by parentheses), a narrow non-breaking space is used. Multi-part abbreviations in German In German typography, it is used between multi-part abbreviations (e.g., "z.B.", "d.h.", "v.l.n.r."). ==Computer languages ==

Non-collapsing behavior Non-breaking spaces are used 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). 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. 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: In contrast, the first few words of this phrase have been separated with many ordinary spaces but are displayed (rendered by the Browser engine) as single spaces: Non-void or non-missing behavior In programming languages or in software analysis languages (such as SAS or R) non-breaking spaces can be useful to fill character-type variables with spaces that are not to be considered insignificant. In general, a string filled with spaces can be interpreted as an empty string or a string of missing data. Replacing ordinary spaces with non-breaking spaces helps resolving the ambiguity between "space", "void" and "missing". == Variations ==

Narrow non-breaking space is a non-breaking space that is narrower than the standard non-breaking space (U+00A0). For Mongolian, it is usually one third the width of a normal space; in other contexts, its width is about 70% of the normal space, but may resemble that of the thin space (U+2009), at least with some fonts. This text replaces spaces with narrow non-breaking spaces: Narrow non-breaking space was introduced in 1999 in Unicode 3.0 for Mongolian, to separate a suffix from the word stem without indicating a word boundary. It also triggers special shaping of those suffixes. Starting in Unicode 16.0, it is no longer recommended for this purpose because the Mongolian vowel separator (U+180E) has taken on this function. In French typography, it is called ) and Venetian (starting in Unicode CLDR 44). In Spanish, the Royal Spanish Academy and Association of Academies of the Spanish Language's Diccionario panhispánico de dudas prescribes a small space as the number group separator, although this is not the case in Unicode's Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR). Figure space A figure space is a non-breaking space whose width is equal to the figure (0–9) characters. ==Unicode ==

Unicode has multiple non-breaking space characters: • • • • is a byte order mark, whose use in text is deemed an "unsupported character" in Unicode ( should be used if the need arises). == See also ==