U+00A0
NO-BREAK SPACE
Non-breaking space. Legitimate in typography, also a common web artifact.
- Codepoint
- U+00A0
- Short
- NBSP
- Group
space-variant- Class
context-dependent- Default
- replaced
- Replaced by
- U+0020
What it is
The non-breaking space looks exactly like an ordinary space and behaves differently in one respect: a line may not break there. It is the single most common character to come along when text is copied out of a web page.
Where it comes from
From typography done properly — and from web pages and word processors doing it automatically, whether or not it was wanted. Copying a price, a date or a unit out of a rendered page very often brings one along.
When it belongs
Constantly. It belongs between a number and its unit, between an abbreviation and what follows it, and anywhere a line break would separate two things that belong together.
TraceFree PRO replaces it with an ordinary space rather than deleting it. That is the whole difference between a cleanup and a corruption: deleting would turn a price into a single run-together token.
What TraceFree PRO does with it
| Preset | Action |
|---|---|
conservative | asked about |
default | replaced |
report-only | asked about |
strict | replaced |
Context guards can only ever make a cleanup gentler, never sharper. A rule saying “always remove” does not override them.
How to remove it
In TraceFree PRO, turn on the clipboard watcher and copy the text. On the command line:
tracefree clean --backup document.txt
pbpaste | tracefree clean | pbcopyReport without changing anything — exit code 1 on findings, so it works in CI:
tracefree check -r ./docsHow to write it
This page never prints the character itself, only ways of writing it. A page about invisible characters that contained invisible characters would be unreviewable — and that is the problem the program exists to solve.
| Notation | Value |
|---|---|
| Unicode | U+00A0 |
| Rust | \u{A0} |
| JavaScript, Python | \u00A0 |
| HTML |     |
| Regex (PCRE, Rust) | \x{A0} |
Related characters
Try it on your own text
Paste anything into the browser demo and see what is in it. Same engine as the app, running entirely on your device — nothing is uploaded.
