technoguy

In computing, a control character or non-printing character, is a code point (a number) in a character set that does not in itself represent a written symbol. All entries in the ASCII table below 32 (technically the C0 control code set) are of this kind, including BEL (which is intended to cause an audible signal in the receiving terminal), SYN (which is a synchronization signal), and ENQ (a signal that is intended to trigger a response at the receiving end, to see if it is still present). The Unicode standard has added many new non-printing characters, for example the Zero-width non-joiner. The remainder of this article covers control codes in general and some codes that are in common use. For detailed tables of the C0 and C1 control codes used in ASCII and ISO-8859-n, please see their respective articles.