Home Home  Article Index Article Index  
GuruPedia  

Whitespace

For information on the programming language Whitespace, see Whitespace programming language.


In computer science, a whitespace (or a whitespace character) is any character which does not display itself but does take up space. For example, the character symbol " ", which is a blank space. Whitespaces are generated by the space bar or the tab key; depending on context, a line-break generated by the return or enter key may be considered whitespace as well.

Whitespace can also refer to a series of whitespace characters. Within computer code, the size of whitespace is generally ignored by free-form languages. In the Python programming language whitespace and indentation are used for syntactical purposes.

In many programming languages abundant use of whitespace, especially trailing whitespace at the end of lines, is considered a nuisance.

[ \t]+ is a regular expression that matches whitespace.


Popular Topics

This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.  For the live article, click here.

Privacy