Simplest way to get a complete list of all the UTF-8 whitespace characters in PHP

Question

In PHP, what's the most elegant way to get the complete list (array of strings) of all the Unicode whitespace characters, encoded in utf8?

I need that to generate test data.

Answer 1

This email (archived here) contains a list of all Unicode whitespace characters encoded in UTF-8, UTF-16, and HTML.

In the archived link look for the 'utf8_whitespace_table' function.

static $whitespace = array(
    "SPACE" => "\x20",
    "NO-BREAK SPACE" => "\xc2\xa0",
    "OGHAM SPACE MARK" => "\xe1\x9a\x80",
    "EN QUAD" => "\xe2\x80\x80",
    "EM QUAD" => "\xe2\x80\x81",
    "EN SPACE" => "\xe2\x80\x82",
    "EM SPACE" => "\xe2\x80\x83",
    "THREE-PER-EM SPACE" => "\xe2\x80\x84",
    "FOUR-PER-EM SPACE" => "\xe2\x80\x85",
    "SIX-PER-EM SPACE" => "\xe2\x80\x86",
    "FIGURE SPACE" => "\xe2\x80\x87",
    "PUNCTUATION SPACE" => "\xe2\x80\x88",
    "THIN SPACE" => "\xe2\x80\x89",
    "HAIR SPACE" => "\xe2\x80\x8a",
    "ZERO WIDTH SPACE" => "\xe2\x80\x8b",
    "NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE" => "\xe2\x80\xaf",
    "MEDIUM MATHEMATICAL SPACE" => "\xe2\x81\x9f",
    "IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE" => "\xe3\x80\x80",
);

Answer 2

Years later, this question still has top results on Google when looking for unicode whitespace characters. devio's answer is great, but incomplete. As of this writing (October 2017) Wikipedia has a list of whitespace characters here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character

This list has specifies 25 code points, whereas the currently accepted answer lists 18. Including the seven other code points, the list is:

U+0009  character tabulation
U+000A  line feed
U+000B  line tabulation
U+000C  form feed
U+000D  carriage return
U+0020  space
U+0085  next line
U+00A0  no-break space
U+1680  ogham space mark
U+180E  mongolian vowel separator
U+2000  en quad
U+2001  em quad
U+2002  en space
U+2003  em space
U+2004  three-per-em space
U+2005  four-per-em space
U+2006  six-per-em space
U+2007  figure space
U+2008  punctuation space
U+2009  thin space
U+200A  hair space
U+200B  zero width space
U+200C  zero width non-joiner
U+200D  zero width joiner
U+2028  line separator
U+2029  paragraph separator
U+202F  narrow no-break space
U+205F  medium mathematical space
U+2060  word joiner
U+3000  ideographic space
U+FEFF  zero width non-breaking space

Answer 3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_%28punctuation%29#Spaces_in_Unicode

Unfortunately, it doesn't give UTF-8, but it does have the character in the web page, so you could cut and paste into your editor (if it saves in UTF-8). Alternatively, http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/180E/index.htm gives UTF-8 (replace "180E" with the hex UTF-16 value you are looking up).

This also gives a couple extra characters that @devio's excellent answer misses.