Space (punctuation)

A space is a punctuation convention for providing interword separation in some scripts, including the Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic. Not all languages use spaces between words; the ancient Latin and Greek did not, nor does the modern Chinese.

Spaces were not used to separate words until roughly 600-800 AD. (See interword separation for more on the history.)

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In computer programming, the space corresponds to Unicode and ASCII character 32, or 0x0020.

In programming language syntax, spaces are frequently used to explicitly separate tokens[?]. Aside from this use, spaces and other whitespace are usually ignored by most modern programming languages; Python is one exception.

In word processors and text editors, if a line on a screen is shorter than the width of the screen or window, then the empty space to the right usually does not correspond with space characters in the file: there is simply a code indicating that the next text should be put on a new line. Thus, the size of the file is not made unnecessarily larger. If there are space characters, one usually does not see the difference; text editors and word processors often have an option to make them visible. Also, if there is a space character, the cursor can move there, otherwise usually not.