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.)

In computer programming languages, 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.

When a file name with a space is used in an URL it is converted to %20. This refers to the hexadecimal representation of the number 32, which is the ASCII-value of a space.

If a line on a screen is shorter than the width of the screen or window than the empty space to the right usually does not correspond with space characters in the file: there is just a code indicating that the next text should be put on a new line; thus the file size is not unnecessarily large. If there are space characters one usually does not see the difference; an editor or wordprocessor often has an option to make them visible. Also, if there is a space character the cursor can move there, otherwise usually not.