Important:
This is retired content. This content is outdated and is no longer being maintained. It is provided as a courtesy for individuals who are still using these technologies. This content may contain URLs that were valid when originally published, but now link to sites or pages that no longer exist.
A version of this page is also available for
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