Is " " a replacement of " "?

Question

In my ASP.NET application, I was trying to add few white spaces between two text boxes by typing space bar. The equivalent HTML source was   instead of  . So I just wanted to check: is this the new replacement for white space? If yes, any idea why they changed?

score 161 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 02 '17 at 10:55

161

  is the character entity reference (meant to be easily parseable by humans).
  is the numeric entity reference (meant to be easily parseable by machines).

They are the same except for the fact that the latter does not need another lookup table to find its actual value. The lookup table is called a DTD, by the way.

You can read more about character entity references in the offical W3C documents.

edited Oct 02 '17 at 10:55

zb226

9,586
6
49
79

answered Jul 18 '10 at 04:32

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams

776,304
153
1,341
1,358

Is there any change to convert these numeric entity referenece into the character enitiy reference? – user2140111 Sep 04 '15 at 10:41
Note that in a diagram.cd it's not interpreted – Marc Roussel Oct 21 '16 at 15:38

score 22 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 18 '10 at 04:34

22

Those do both mean non-breaking space, yes.   is another synonym, in hex.

answered Jul 18 '10 at 04:34

JAL

21,295
1
48
66

score 16 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 18 '10 at 04:34

16

  is the numeric reference for the entity reference   — they are the exact same thing. It's likely your editor is simply inserting the numberic reference instead of the named one.

See the Wikipedia page for the non-breaking space.

answered Jul 18 '10 at 04:34

josh3736

139,160
33
216
263

Is " " a replacement of " "?

3 Answers3

Linked