White-Space Characters

Space, tab, line feed (newline), carriage return, form feed, and vertical tab characters are called "white-space characters" because they serve the same purpose as the spaces between words and lines on a printed page — they make reading easier. Tokens are delimited (bounded) by white-space characters and by other tokens, such as operators and punctuation. When parsing code, the C compiler ignores white-space characters unless you use them as separators or as components of character constants or string literals. Use white-space characters to make a program more readable. Note that the compiler also treats comments as white space.

See also

C Tokens