Developing Apama Applications > Apama EPL Reference > Lexical Elements > White space
White space
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.
WhiteSpace
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 ASCIIWhiteSpace characters and their encodings are listed below:
ASCIIWhiteSpace characters and their encodings
Code Point
UTF-8 Encoding
ASCII Encoding
Name
0x0020
0x20
0x20
Space
0x0009
0x09
0x09
Horizontal Tab
0x000c
0x0c
0x0c
Form Feed
0x001c
0x1c
0x1c
File Separator
0x001d
0x1d
0x1d
Group Separator
0x001e
0x1e
0x1e
Record Separator
0x001f
0x1f
0x1f
Unit Separator
The UnicodeWhiteSpace characters, as defined by the Unicode character dictionary, and their encodings are listed below:
UnicodeWhiteSpace characters and their encodings
Code Point
UTF-8 Encoding
Name
0x0085
0xc2 0x85
unnamed control character
0x00a0
0xc2 0xa0
NO-BREAK SPACE
0x1680
0xe1 0x9a 0x80
OGHAM SPACE MARK
0x180e
0xe1 0xa0 0x8e
MONGOLIAN VOWEL SEPARATOR
0x2000
0xe2 0x80 0x80
EN QUAD
0x2001
0xe2 0x80 0x81
EM QUAD
0x2002
0xe2 0x80 0x82
EN SPACE
0x2003
0xe2 0x80 0x83
EM SPACE
0x2004
0xe2 0x80 0x84
THREE-PER-EM SPACE
0x2005
0xe2 0x80 0x85
FOUR-PER-EM SPACE
0x2006
0xe2 0x80 0x86
SIX-PER-EM SPACE
0x2007
0xe2 0x80 0x87
FIGURE SPACE
0x2008
0xe2 0x80 0x88
PUNCTUATION SPACE
0x2009
0xe2 0x80 0x89
THIN SPACE
0x200a
0xe2 0x80 0x8a
HAIR SPACE
0x2028
0xe2 0x80 0xa8
LINE SEPARATOR
0x2029
0xe2 0x80 0xa9
PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR
0x202f
0xe2 0x80 0xaf
NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE
0x205f
0xe2 0x81 0x9f
MEDIUM MATHEMATICAL SPACE
0x3000
0xe3 0x80 0x80
IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE
All white space characters appearing between two symbols are ignored. However, note that white space appearing within string literals is not igored. See Literals.
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