U+205F
MEDIUM MATHEMATICAL SPACE
Fixed-width space from mathematical typesetting.
- Codepoint
- U+205F
- Short
- MMSP
- Group
space-variant- Class
context-dependent- Default
- replaced
- Replaced by
- U+0020
What it is
Spaces that are not the ordinary space: some prevent a line break at that point, some have a fixed width regardless of the font, some do both. They are visible as whitespace but indistinguishable by eye from a normal space.
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
Often. A non-breaking space between a number and its unit is correct typography in German, French and English alike, and keeping a value and its unit on one line is the whole point of it.
That is why TraceFree PRO replaces these characters with an ordinary space rather than deleting them. Deleting merges words: a price would lose the gap between the number and the currency symbol. Replacing keeps the text readable and makes the spacing predictable.
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+205F |
| Rust | \u{205F} |
| JavaScript, Python | \u205F |
| HTML |     |
| Regex (PCRE, Rust) | \x{205F} |
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.
