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In computing, the term hard space has several meanings, all related to a special way of representing the whitespace between characters.

• The most commonly used meaning is the same as non-breaking space: a special space character used by a word processor that forbids an automatic line breaking (line wrap) at its position. A hard space on a PC is commonly entered by holding down the ALT key and pressing 0160 on the numeric pad, or by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+SPACE.

• In earlier days of text editors that worked with text mode CRT displays, when a paragraph has to be justified, this achieved by means of inserting extra soft spaces at whitespaces. The soft spaces were so called because they could be "compressed" away during further editing. By contrast, ordinary spaces were called hard or incompressible spaces.

• Also, in some older text editors, the hard spaces were both non-expandable—i.e., no soft spaces could be added to them—and non-breaking ones.

See also

• Control character
• Space (punctuation)
• Space character

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