Zero-width space

The zero-width space marks a potential line break without hyphenation. Its semantics and HTML implementation are similar to the soft hyphen, but soft hyphens display a hyphen character at the point where the line is broken. The zero-width space can be used to mark word breaks in languages without visible space between words, such as Thai, Myanmar, Khmer, and Japanese. In justified text, the rendering engine may add inter-character spacing, also known as letter spacing, between letters separated by a zero-width space, unlike around fixed-width spaces. Example To show the effect of the zero-width space in text, the following words have been separated with zero-width spaces: By contrast, the following words have not been separated: The first text is broken into lines but only at word boundaries, and resizing the browser window will re-break the text accordingly, while the second text is not broken at all. == Usage ==

HTML In HTML pages, the HTML element functions as a zero-width space. In Internet Explorer 6, the zero-width space was not supported in some fonts. Prohibition in domain names ICANN rules prohibit domain names from containing non-displayed characters, including the zero-width space, and most browsers prohibit their use within domain names because they can be used to create a homograph attack, where a malicious URL is visually indistinguishable from a legitimate one. == Encoding ==

The zero-width space character is encoded in Unicode as . In HTML, it can be referenced as , or . Additionally, the character entities ​, ​, ​, and ​ all also refer to the zero-width space, contrary to what their names suggest. The TeX representation is ; the LaTeX representation is \hspace{0pt}; and the groff representation is \:. == See also ==