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There were quite a few control characters defined (33 in ASCII, and the ECMA-48 standard adds 32 more). This was because early terminals had very primitive mechanical or electrical controls that made any kind of state-remembering API quite expensive to implement, thus a different code for each and every function looked like a requirement.
1 Control-C has typically been used as a "break" or "interrupt" key. 2 Control-D has been used to signal "end of file" for text typed in at the terminal on Unix / Linux systems. Windows, DOS, and older minicomputers used Control-Z for this purpose. 3 Control-G is an artifact of the days when teletypes were in use. Important messages could be ...
Many Unicode characters are used to control the interpretation or display of text, but these characters themselves have no visual or spatial representation. For example, the null character (U+0000 NULL) is used in C-programming application environments to indicate the end of a string of characters.
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.
The block contains all the letters and control codes of the ASCII encoding. It ranges from U+0000 to U+007F, contains 128 characters and includes the C0 controls, ASCII punctuation and symbols, ASCII digits, both the uppercase and lowercase of the English alphabet and a control character.
One example is the VT52 terminal, which allowed the cursor to be placed at an x,y location on the screen by sending the ESC character, a Y character, and then two characters representing numerical values equal to the x,y location plus 32 (thus starting at the ASCII space character and avoiding the control characters).
In 1973, ECMA-35 and ISO 2022 [18] attempted to define a method so an 8-bit "extended ASCII" code could be converted to a corresponding 7-bit code, and vice versa. [19] In a 7-bit environment, the Shift Out would change the meaning of the 96 bytes 0x20 through 0x7F [a] [21] (i.e. all but the C0 control codes), to be the characters that an 8-bit environment would print if it used the same code ...
For the control-codes outside of the range 1–26, the notation extends to the adjacent, non-alphabetic ASCII characters. Often a control character can be typed on a keyboard by holding down the Ctrl and typing the character shown after the caret.