Non-breaking space (NBSP) should work
AI ignores NBSP when it's places as symbol. 'No break' option is an option but ridiculously hard to be applied quickly. Anyway NBSP should work

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Silas Yamakami commented
While we wait for Adobe to fix this, I use a simple scripts to enable and disable "no break". I assigned a shortcut to it with AutoHotkey
#target illustrator
var nobreak = app.selection.characterAttributes.noBreak
app.selection.characterAttributes.kerningMethod = AutoKernType.METRICSROMANONLYif (nobreak == false){
app.selection.characterAttributes.noBreak = true;
} else {app.selection.characterAttributes.noBreak = false;} -
DJC commented
Please fix this. This is a significant limitation in the typographical engine.
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Anonymous commented
Illustrator does ignore glyph U+00A0 (no-break space). Please stop replacing U+00A0 by U+0020 (space) in Illustrator and support non breaking space like all standard apps in 2019.
If I copy-paste text from InDesign to identitcal text frame, the result in Illustrator may be different because of this VERY OLD bug.