xa0

xA0 typically refers to the hexadecimal value 0xA0, which corresponds to the Unicode code point U+00A0, named NO-BREAK SPACE. It represents a non-breaking space character used in text processing to prevent a line break at its position.

In terms of encoding, U+00A0 is represented differently depending on the encoding. In UTF-8, it is encoded as the two-byte sequence 0xC2 0xA0. In the single-byte encodings ISO-8859-1 and Windows-1252, the byte 0xA0 maps directly to the NO-BREAK SPACE. In HTML, the non-breaking space is commonly written as  , or as character references   or  .

The primary function of a non-breaking space is to act as whitespace that does not allow automatic line wrapping between adjacent characters. It is frequently used to keep units and numbers together (for example, "$ 100" or "Fig. 3 b") or to preserve spacing in languages where line breaks would be undesirable. In web pages, NBSP is also a way to enforce spacing without introducing a visible extra space, since multiple NBSPs can be used to simulate wider gaps where allowed by rendering.

Notationally, xA0 or 0xA0 can appear in code to denote a byte value in hexadecimal. In source code, escapes may differ by language: some languages use \xA0, others use \u00A0, and HTML uses  . While related to the same character, contexts and encodings determine its exact representation and behavior.