The zero-width space (ZWSP) is a non-printing character used in computerized typesetting to indicate word boundaries to text processing systems when using scripts that do not use explicit spacing, or after characters (such as the slash) that are not followed by a visible space but after which there may nevertheless be a line break. Normally it isn't a visible separation, but it may expand in passages that are fully justified. In HTML pages this space can be used as a potential line-break in long words as a replacement for the non-standard <wbr> tag. However, the zero-width space is not supported in all web browsers, most notably Internet Explorer version 6 and below.[1]
It has the Unicode value of U+200B and its HTML entity is ​. To show the effect of a zero-width space, the following words have been separated with zero-width spaces:
AntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianismAntidisestablishmentarianism
On browsers supporting zero-width spaces, resizing the window will re-break the above text only at word boundaries.
Its semantics and HTML implementation are comparable to but different from the soft hyphen.