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What is White Space?

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Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R3

4/8/2010

White space refers to characters in an XML document, such as spaces and tabs, that are invisible when represented in a text editor like Notepad or an application like Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Character Entity representation

Space

  (hexadecimal  )

Carriage return


 (
)

Tab

	 (	)

Line feed (newline)


 (
)

Note

A nonbreaking space ( , hexadecimal  ) is not considered white space because that content is not to be interpreted as an allowable place to break to a new line. In a Web environment, practical uses for the nonbreaking space are limited; generally, you want the browser to wrap long lines.

You can control white space output in an XML document by using Document Object Model (DOM) or XSL Transformation (XSLT) functionality.

See Also

Concepts

Controlling White Space with XSLT