White space characters are characters such as spaces and tabs that are used between symbols to separate them. White space characters are sometimes required between symbols when they would otherwise be misinterpreted or unrecognizable. For example, the symbol / is used as the division operator and the symbol * is used as the multiplication operator, but the character pair /* with no white space between them marks the beginning of a block comment.

Though they act as separators between symbols, white space characters are otherwise ignored and discarded during program compilation.

Judicious use of white space improves a program's readability.

The ASCII white space characters and their encodings are listed below:

The Unicode white space characters, as defined by the Unicode character dictionary, and their encodings are listed below:

All white space characters appearing between two symbols are ignored. However, note that white space appearing within string literals is not ignored. See Literals.