Whitespace
Characters that take up space without showing a mark: spaces, tabs, line breaks, and less obvious ones such as the non-breaking space.
Where it comes up
- Stray whitespace and invisible charactersTwo values look identical on screen but differ by a trailing space, a non-breaking space, or a hidden character.
See also
- EncodingThe rule that maps the bytes in a file to characters. Reading a file with the wrong encoding turns accented letters and symbols into nonsense.
- NormalizationConverting values to a common form or scale. The word is used for text (one case, one spacing), for numbers (a common range), and for database design (removing repetition).