Whitespace

For information on the programming language Whitespace, see Whitespace programming language. For white space in graphic design, see white space.

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 key (Enter key) may be considered whitespace as well.

Whitespace can also refer to a series of whitespace characters. Within source 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.

The term whitespace is based on the assumption that the background color used for text is white, and is thus confusing if it is not.