Non-breaking space
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Template:Unreferenced In computing, a non-breaking space (NBSP) is a special space character that prevents an automatic line break (line wrap) at its position. It is also known as a hard space or fixed space. It can also be used to get multiple spaces in a row in systems like HTML that reduce sequences of normal spaces to a single space.
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Uses
Here are some situations in which using nonbreaking spaces is suggested. (Note that you will not be able to see the effects of the space unless your screen is fairly narrow.)
- Compound proper names: van der Waerden
- Titles: Mr. Jones
- Parts of a document: Chapter 12
- Between the dots of an ellipsis: . . .
- Mathematics: x² + 3
- Enumeration of cases in running text: (1) Genesis
- Languages such as French when punctuation should be preceded or followed by a space: « Arrêtez ! », dit-il.
- Measurements (and other numbers with units): the 100 m dash.
- Numbers over a thousand, where a thin non-breaking space is used instead of a period or comma to separate groups of three digits: 16 384
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Encodings
- In Unicode, it is U+00A0 and is called the No-Break Space.
- In some versions of extended ASCII, character 255 (0xFF) serves as a nonbreaking space.
- In ISO 8859, NBSP is 0xA0.
- In KOI8-R, NBSP is 0x9A.
- In HTML, the entity is written as or  .
- In TeX, a tilde (~) is used to denote the hard space.
Word processors may use different methods to enter a nonbreaking space on the keyboard. For examples:
- The standard shortcut in Microsoft Word is the CTRL+SHIFT+SPACE combination.
- In WordPerfect, this is called a hard space and the shortcut is CTRL+SPACE.
- On the Mac OS, the shortcut is OPTION+SPACE.
- In OpenOffice.org, the shortcut is CTRL+SPACE.
- In vim's insert mode, hit CTRL+K N S (see vim digraphs for more)
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Other types
There are several other non-breaking spaces in the Universal Character Set (ISO 10646) and Unicode:
- Non-breaking thin space, known in Unicode as "NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE" (U+202F)
- Zero-width non-breaking space, known in Unicode as "ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE" (U+FEFF). Note that this character is also used as the UCS BOM (byte order mark). Because of this overloading, RFC 3629 mentions that "Unicode 3.2 adds a new character, U+2060 "WORD JOINER", with exactly the same semantics and usage as U+FEFF except for the signature function, and strongly recommends its exclusive use for expressing word-joining semantics."
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