Braille Blank

Press the button for one braille blank, the empty braille cell that looks like a space and is not one.

Braille Blank

1 × Braille blank (U+2800)

⠀

How many in a row
Braille blank (U+2800)

An empty Braille cell. It takes up room and is not a space, so trimming does not remove it. Some fonts draw it as a faint dotted cell.

No invisible character works everywhere. Paste it where you need it and check. Apps remove these characters whenever they choose, and a blank name can break the rules of the place you use it.

Use these for fun, not for anything that matters. Screen readers read many of these characters badly or skip them, search cannot find them, and some apps strip them or show empty boxes.

Next step Every blank character in one tableKeep blank lines in a caption

All 1 style on this page

How these styles work: none of them is a font. Each one swaps your letters for other characters that Unicode already has, or adds combining marks to them, so the result is plain text that can be pasted anywhere. The maps were built from the Unicode code charts, and a character that has no look-alike is left as it is.

How it works

The braille blank is Braille pattern blank, U+2800: a braille cell with no dots. It has width like a space, yet Unicode files it as a symbol. Some apps strip or block these characters, and screen readers may read them badly.

Read the full guide

The codes for U+2800

The code point is U+2800, the first of the 256 cells in the block Braille Patterns. In HTML write ⠀ or ⠀, since no named entity exists for it. In UTF-8 it is three bytes: E2 A0 80. Its general category is So, other symbol, and it has been in Unicode since version 3.0.

Why trimming leaves it alone

Software that trims spaces looks for characters with the White_Space property, and this one does not have it. Unicode's own note says it is drawn as a fixed-width blank in many fonts but does not act as a space. So a box that refuses a lone space may count one empty braille cell as content.

  • A device with no braille font draws a box, not a blank. Paste once and look before you rely on it.
  • A screen reader may say nothing for a blank cell, or may read out its name. Never use one to hide words people need.

Questions and answers

What is the Braille pattern blank Unicode character?

U+2800 BRAILLE PATTERN BLANK, the cell with none of its eight dots raised. Every other cell in the block is named for its raised dots, such as Braille pattern dots-125. This one is the exception.

Is it a braille space?

In braille the gap between words is a cell with no dots, and Braille ASCII pairs the space key with this pattern. To software it is still not a space: Unicode calls it a symbol and leaves it out of the White_Space list.

Why does it look as if nothing was copied?

An empty cell draws nothing, so the card shows a hatched box as wide as what you copy, under a line that names it: 1 × Braille blank (U+2800). Paste it between two letters and the gap shows.

How is it different from a zero-width space?

The braille blank takes up the room of a letter. The zero-width space, U+200B, takes up none and is a format character, so a form is more likely to treat a message made only of those as empty.

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