The zero-width space (ZWSP) is a non-printing character used in computerized typesetting to indicate word boundaries to text processing systems when using scripts that do not use explicit spacing, or after characters (such as the slash) that are not followed by a visible space but after which there may nevertheless be a line break. Normally, it is not a visible separation, but it may expand in passages that are fully justified.
Contents
Usage
In HTML pages, the zero-width space can be used as a potential line-break in long words as an alternative to the <wbr> element. However, the zero-width space is not supported in all web browsers such as old versions of Internet Explorer (versions 6 and earlier).
To show the effect of the zero-width space, the following words have been separated with zero-width spaces:
And the following words are not separated with these spaces:
On browsers supporting zero-width spaces, resizing the window will re-break the first text only at word boundaries, while the second text will not be broken at all.
Encoding
The zero-width space character is encoded in Unicode as U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE (HTML ​).
The TeX representation is \hskip0pt; the LaTeX representation is \hspace{0pt}; and the groff representation is \:.
Its semantics and HTML implementation are similar to the soft hyphen.