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Generally, an escape character is not a particular case of (device) control characters, nor vice versa.If we define control characters as non-graphic, or as having a special meaning for an output device (e.g. printer or text terminal) then any escape character for this device is a control one.
The \n escape sequence allows for shorter code by specifying the newline in the string literal, and for faster runtime by eliminating the text formatting operation. Also, the compiler can map the escape sequence to a character encoding system other than ASCII and thus make the code more portable.
ANSI escape sequences are a standard for in-band signaling to control cursor location, color, font styling, and other options on video text terminals and terminal emulators. Certain sequences of bytes, most starting with an ASCII escape character and a bracket character, are embedded into text. The terminal interprets these sequences as ...
In C and many derivative programming languages, a string escape sequence is a series of two or more characters, starting with a backslash \. [3]Note that in C a backslash immediately followed by a newline does not constitute an escape sequence, but splices physical source lines into logical ones in the second translation phase, whereas string escape sequences are converted in the fifth ...
The escape character was intended to "quote" the next character, if it was another control character it would print it instead of performing the control function. It is almost never used for this purpose today. Various printable characters are used as visible "escape characters", depending on context.
A computer keyboard with the Esc key in the top-left corner IBM 83-key keyboard (1981), with Esc in the top-left corner of the alphanumeric section. On computer keyboards, the Esc keyEsc (named Escape key in the international standard series ISO/IEC 9995) is a key used to generate the escape character (which can be represented as ASCII code 27 in decimal, Unicode U+001B, or Ctrl+[).
An early typewriter with a backspacer[sic] key.(Blickensderfer Model 7)Although the term "backspace" is the traditional name of the key which steps the carriage back and/or [note 3] deletes the previous character, typically to the left of the cursor, the actual key may be labeled in a variety of ways, for example delete, [1] erase, [note 4] or with a left pointing arrow. [3]
The "escape" character (ESC, code 27), for example, was intended originally to allow sending of other control characters as literals instead of invoking their meaning, an "escape sequence". This is the same meaning of "escape" encountered in URL encodings, C language strings, and other systems where certain characters have a reserved meaning ...