In this guide I will show you how to show symbols in notepad++. This is extremely helpful when trying to debug text files. For example, you can show tabs vs spaces. Or you could see where all of the line ending / new lines are. Sometimes when processing data I might use this to see if any of the lines have multiple spaces at the end of the file. Or making sure only tabs are used over spaces.
As you can see in the image below, on the 4th line down we don’t know if the large space there is a tab, spaces, or a combination of both. In some cases this can make a big difference to the user. Especially when processing data programatically.
To show symbols you will click on View in the menu, then Show Symbol. From here you have three different options that you can choose from.
- White Space and TAB – If you only want to see white spaces and tabs
- End of Line – If you only want to see the line endings
- All Characters – If you want to see everything
I chose the Show All Characters options. Now when we look at the space in the below screen shot we can see that it is a combination of tabs and spaces.
If you would like to remove the symbols from showing, you can simply follow these steps to uncheck the option that was selected.
As you can see it was easy to show symbols in notepad++. What do you like using this feature for? Drop a comment down below to get the conversation started.
Wrap up
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