Space

The Space at U+0020 is the ordinary blank separator used between words and many other text units. It is the basic spacing character of the C0 Controls and Basic Latin block and is classified as whitespace, even though it has no visible mark of its own. In everyday writing, it is the default word space in English and many other languages written with spaced words: “new book” is read as two words because this character separates them. It also appears after many punctuation marks in normal prose, between initials or abbreviations, and in addresses, dates, and form entries where a simple blank gap is needed. In computing, this is the space most keyboards insert with the spacebar and the one most text tools treat as the standard ASCII space. It separates command-line arguments, words in plain-text search, tokens in many programming languages, and fields in simple text formats. The main practical gotcha is that it is invisible but significant: leading, trailing, doubled, or missing spaces can change matching, sorting, passwords, file names, and command behavior while being hard to notice.