Whitespace character in the context of Indent style

In computing and telecommunications, a character is the encoded representation of a natural language character (including letter, numeral and punctuation), whitespace (space or tab), or a control character (controls computer hardware that consumes character-based data). A sequence of characters is called a string.

Some character encoding systems represent each character using a fixed number of bits whereas other systems use varying sizes. Various fixed-length sizes were used for now obsolete systems such as the six-bit character code, the five-bit Baudot code and even 4-bit systems (with only 16 possible values). The more modern ASCII system uses the 8-bit byte for each character. Today, the Unicode-based UTF-8 encoding uses a varying number of byte-sized code units to define a code point which combine to encode a character.

Character encoding is a convention of using a numeric value to represent each character of a writing script. Not only can a character set include natural language symbols, but it can also include codes that have meanings or functions outside of language, such as control characters and whitespace. Character encodings have also been defined for some constructed languages. When encoded, character data can be stored, transmitted, and transformed by a computer. The numerical values that make up a character encoding are known as code points and collectively comprise a code space or a code page.

Early character encodings that originated with optical or electrical telegraphy and in early computers could only represent a subset of the characters used in languages, sometimes restricted to upper case letters, numerals and limited punctuation. Over time, encodings capable of representing more characters were created, such as ASCII, ISO/IEC 8859, and Unicode encodings such as UTF-8 and UTF-16.

In computing, a command is a high-level instruction received via an external interface that directs the behavior of a computer program. Commonly, commands are sent to a program via a command-line interface, a script, a network protocol, or as an event triggered in a graphical user interface.

Many commands support arguments to specify input and to modify default behavior. Terminology and syntax varies but there are notable common approaches. Typically, an option or a flag is a name (without whitespace) with a prefix such as dash or slash that modifies default behavior. An option might have a required value that follows it. Typically, flag refers to an option that does not have a following value. A parameter is an argument that specifies input to the command and its meaning is based on its position in the command line relative to other parameters; generally ignoring options. A parameter can specify anything, but often it specifies a file by name or path.

An em (from em quadrat) is a unit in the field of typography, equal to the currently specified point size. It corresponds to the body height of the typeface. For example, one em in a 16-point typeface is 16 points. Therefore, this unit is the same for all typefaces at a given point size.

The em space   is one em wide.

Myspace (formerly stylized as MySpace, currently myspace; and sometimes my␣, with an elongated open box symbol) is an American social networking service. Launched on August 1, 2003, it was the first social network to reach a global audience and had a significant influence on technology, pop culture and music. It also played a critical role in the early growth of companies like YouTube and created a developer platform that launched companies such as Zynga, RockYou, and Photobucket, among others, to success. From 2005 to 2009, Myspace was the largest social networking site in the world.

In July 2005, Myspace was acquired by News Corporation for $580 million; in June 2006, it surpassed Yahoo Mail and Google Search to become the most visited website in the United States. During the 2008 fiscal year, it generated $800 million in revenue. At its peak in April 2008, Myspace had 115 million monthly visitors; by that time, the recently emergent Facebook had about the same number of visitors, but somewhat more global users than MySpace. In May 2009, Facebook surpassed Myspace in its number of unique U.S. visitors. Since then, the number of Myspace users has declined steadily despite several redesigns. As of 2019, Myspace had seven million monthly visitors.

In typography, a quad (originally quadrat) was a metal spacer used in letterpress typesetting. The term was later adopted as the generic name for two common sizes of spaces in typography, regardless of the form of typesetting used. An em quad (originally m quadrat) is a space that is one em wide; as wide as the height of the font. An en quad (originally n quadrat) is a space that is one en wide: half the width of an em quad.

Both are encoded as characters in the General Punctuation code block of the Unicode character set as U+2000   EN QUAD and U+2001   EM QUAD, which are also defined to be canonically equivalent to U+2002   EN SPACE and U+2003   EM SPACE respectively.