basiswhitespaceteken

Basiswhitespaceteken is a term used in text processing to refer to the base whitespace character that serves as the primary delimiter for tokenization in a given system. In most contexts the basis whitespace teken is the ASCII space (U+0020), which functions as the default separator between tokens in plain text and many data formats. The concept distinguishes this canonical character from other whitespace characters such as tabs, newlines, or non-breaking spaces, which may be treated differently by parsers.

The term is observed mainly in niche literature and certain codebases, especially in Dutch-language documentation, to emphasize a single, standard whitespace character used for base tokenization. In practice, software often implements basis whitespace as part of a broader whitespace handling strategy, including trimming, collapse of consecutive whitespace, and normalization to the space character.

In tokenization workflows, identifying the basis whitespace character allows predictable splitting of input into tokens, words, or fields. Some systems also bind the basis whitespace to ASCII 0x20 for compatibility with legacy data, while others adopt Unicode-safe approaches that treat any whitespace class as equivalent.

Variants and encoding: While U+0020 is the canonical example, modern processors may treat sequences of various whitespace characters as equivalent, depending on configuration. For interoperability, it is common to document whether the basis whitespace is fixed to 0x20 or multiplexed with other whitespace classes.

See also: whitespace, tokenization, ASCII space, Unicode whitespace, whitespace normalization.