No irregular whitespace (no-irregular-whitespace)

Invalid or irregular whitespace causes issues with ECMAScript 5 parsers and also makes code harder to debug in a similar nature to mixed tabs and spaces.

Various whitespace characters can be inputted by programmers by mistake for example from copying or keyboard shortcuts. Pressing Alt + Space on OS X adds in a non breaking space character for example.

Known issues these spaces cause:

Rule Details

This rule is aimed at catching invalid whitespace that is not a normal tab and space. Some of these characters may cause issues in modern browsers and others will be a debugging issue to spot.

With this rule enabled the following characters will cause warnings outside of strings:

\u000B - Line Tabulation (\v) - <VT>
\u000C - Form Feed (\f) - <FF>
\u00A0 - No-Break Space - <NBSP>
\u0085 - Next Line
\u1680 - Ogham Space Mark
\u180E - Mongolian Vowel Separator - <MVS>
\ufeff - Zero Width No-Break Space - <BOM>
\u2000 - En Quad
\u2001 - Em Quad
\u2002 - En Space - <ENSP>
\u2003 - Em Space - <EMSP>
\u2004 - Tree-Per-Em
\u2005 - Four-Per-Em
\u2006 - Six-Per-Em
\u2007 - Figure Space
\u2008 - Punctuation Space - <PUNCSP>
\u2009 - Thin Space
\u200A - Hair Space
\u200B - Zero Width Space - <ZWSP>
\u2028 - Line Separator
\u2029 - Paragraph Separator
\u202F - Narrow No-Break Space
\u205f - Medium Mathematical Space
\u3000 - Ideographic Space

The following examples are considered warnings:

function thing()<NBSP>{
  return 'test';
}

function thing(<NBSP>){
  return 'test';
}

function thing<NBSP>(){
  return 'test';
}

function thing<MVS>(){
  return 'test';
}

function thing() {
  return 'test';<ZWSP>
}

function thing() {
  return 'test';<NBSP>
}

The following patterns are not considered warnings:

function thing() {
  return '<NBSP>thing';
}

function thing() {
  return '<ZWSP>thing';
}

function thing() {
  return 'th<NBSP>ing';
}

When Not To Use It

If you decide that you wish to use whitespace other than tabs and spaces outside of strings in your application.

Further Reading

Version

This rule was introduced in ESLint 0.9.0.

Resources