What is the symbol for whitespace in C?

The ASCII value of Space is 32. So you can compare your char to the octal value of 32 which is 40 or its hexadecimal value which is 20.

if(c == '\40') { ... }

or

if(c == '\x20') { ... }

Any number after the \ is assumed to be octal, if the character just after \ is not x, in which case it is considered to be a hexadecimal.

The character representation of a Space is simply ' '.

void foo (const char *s)
{
    unsigned char c;
    ...
    if (c == ' ')
        ...
}

But if you are really looking for all whitespace, then C has a function (actually it's often a macro) for that:

#include <ctype.h>
...

void foo (const char *s)
{
    char c;
    ...
    if (isspace(c))
        ...
}

You can read about isspace here

If you really want to catch all non-printing characters, the function to use is isprint from the same library. This deals with all of the characters below 0x20 (the ASCII code for a space) and above 0x7E (0x7f is the code for DEL, and everything above that is an extension).

In raw code this is equivalent to:

if (c < ' ' || c >= 0x7f)
    // Deal with non-printing characters.

There is no particular symbol for whitespace. It is actually a set of few characters which are:

' '      space 
'\t'     horizontal tab 
'\n'     newline
'\v'     vertical tab 
'\f'     form feed 
'\r'     carriage return    

Use isspace standard library function from ctype.h if you want to check for any of these white-spaces.

For just a space, use ' '.