The Z-Machine Standards Document 13. In Versions 4 and later, the encoded text has 6 bytes and always contains 9 Z-characters. It must not contain two entries with the same encoded text. 6.1 First, the text is broken up into words.
Spaces divide up words and are otherwise ignored.
Word separators also divide words, but each one of them is considered a word in its own right. For the format, see the read opcode. Because the letters in A0 are in alphabetical order, because the bits are ordered in the right way and because the pad character 5 is less than the values for the letters, the numerical ordering corresponds to normal English alphabetical order for ordinary words. Linards Ticmanis reports that some of Infocom's interpreters convert question marks to spaces before lexical analysis. This is not Standard behaviour.