Is “ ” a replacement of “ ”?

Question

In my ASP.NET application, I was trying to add few white spaces between two text boxes by typing space bar. The equivalent HTML source was   instead of

Answer 1

  is the numeric reference for the entity reference   — they are the exact same thing. It's likely your editor is simply inserting the numberic reference instead of the named one.

See the Wikipedia page for the non-breaking space.