Complete Guide to Unicode Whitespace Characters

Unicode Whitespace Character Reference

Unicode defines many more whitespace and invisible characters than the basic space and newline. Understanding them is essential for robust text processing.

Standard Whitespace Characters

Character	Unicode	Name	Marker
Space	U+0020	Space	·
Tab	U+0009	Character Tabulation	→
LF	U+000A	Line Feed	↵
CR	U+000D	Carriage Return	←
NBSP	U+00A0	No-Break Space	°

Zero-Width Characters

Character	Unicode	Name	Marker
ZWS	U+200B	Zero Width Space	[ZWS]
ZWJ	U+200D	Zero Width Joiner	[ZWJ]
ZWNJ	U+200C	Zero Width Non-Joiner	[ZWNJ]
SHY	U+00AD	Soft Hyphen	[SHY]
BOM	U+FEFF	Byte Order Mark / Zero Width No-Break Space	[BOM]

Other Unicode Spaces (Not in Visualizer)

These are less common but worth knowing about:

Unicode	Name	Width
U+2000	En Quad	Width of letter N
U+2001	Em Quad	Width of letter M
U+2002	En Space	Half an em
U+2003	Em Space	Full em
U+2004	Three-Per-Em Space	1/3 em
U+2005	Four-Per-Em Space	1/4 em
U+2006	Six-Per-Em Space	1/6 em
U+2007	Figure Space	Width of a digit
U+2008	Punctuation Space	Width of a period
U+2009	Thin Space	1/5 em
U+200A	Hair Space	Very thin
U+202F	Narrow No-Break Space	Narrow NBSP
U+205F	Medium Mathematical Space	4/18 em
U+3000	Ideographic Space	Full-width CJK space

How Characters Get Mixed In

1. Copy from web: HTML renders various space entities
2. Copy from documents: Word processors use typographic spaces
3. Multi-language input: Different input methods produce different spaces
4. API responses: External data may contain unexpected Unicode
5. Database migration: Character encoding conversion can introduce artifacts

Using the Whitespace Visualizer

The tool detects the 11 most commonly problematic characters listed in the first two tables. Paste any suspicious text to immediately see which invisible characters are present, their exact positions, and their counts. Use the Clean feature to selectively remove specific types.