Whitespaces

In the Internet Object format, whitespace refers to any character with a Unicode code point less than or equal to U+0020 (i.e., characters in the range U+0000 to U+0020). This range includes both non-printable control characters and common whitespace characters such as the horizontal tab (U+0009), newline (U+000A), vertical tab (U+000B), form feed (U+000C), carriage return (U+000D), and space (U+0020).

In addition to the characters in the range U+0000 to U+0020, the Internet Object format also includes characters in the Unicode whitespace category as whitespace. This includes characters such as the non-breaking space (U+00A0), em space (U+2003), and en space (U+2002), among others. Including Unicode whitespace characters can also make it easier to work with text in languages that use non-Latin scripts, such as Arabic, Chinese, or Japanese.

It's also worth noting that the Internet Object format recognizes the zero-width non-breaking space (U+FEFF) as whitespace. This character is often used as a byte order mark (BOM) in Unicode-encoded documents. Incorporating a more comprehensive range of whitespace characters in Internet Object offers several advantages that can make the format easier to work with, more readable, and more compatible with different systems and programming languages.

The following table shows a list of valid whitespace characters.

code points	Description
U+0000 to U+0020	Space, Line Feed, Carriage Return, Tab, Bell, etc.	Any character having charCode <=0x20 such as space. ASCII space and control characters
U+1680	Ogham Space Mark	Space used in Ogham scripts
U+2000	En Quad	Space equal to the width of the lowercase letter "n"
U+2001	Em Quad	Space equal to the width of the uppercase letter "M"
U+2002	En Space	Space equal to half the width of the em space
U+2003	Em Space	Space equal to the width of the em space
U+2004	Three-per-Em Space	Space equal to one-third of an em space
U+2005	Four-per-Em Space	Space equal to one-quarter of an em space
U+2006	Six-per-Em Space	Space equal to one-sixth of an em space
U+2007	Figure Space	Space equal to the width of a numeral character
U+2008	Punctuation Space	Space used for punctuation
U+2009	Thin Space	Space narrower than the regular space character
U+200A	Hair Space	Very narrow space used for special purposes
U+2028	Line Separator	Character used to separate lines in text
U+2029	Paragraph Separator	Character used to separate paragraphs in text
U+202F	Narrow No-Break Space	Non-breaking space narrower than the regular space character
U+205F	Medium Mathematical Space	Space used in mathematical notation
U+3000	Ideographic Space	Space used in East Asian scripts
U+FEFF	Byte Order Mark (BOM)	Zero Width Non-Breaking Space

Internet Object is not whitespace-sensitive, which means that the parser ignores the whitespaces surrounding the values and structural elements. However, any whitespace characters found within the values or strings themselves are preserved.

Using whitespace can help to make the Internet Object document more readable, but it is not required. When transmitting data over the wire, any whitespace characters can be safely ignored as they do not affect the document's content.