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Non-printing characters or formatting marks are characters for content designing in word processors, which are not displayed at printing. It is also possible to customize their display on the monitor. The most common non-printable characters in word processors are pilcrow, space, non-breaking space, tab character etc. [1] [2]
Unicode added more characters that could be considered controls, but it makes a distinction between these "Formatting characters" (such as the zero-width non-joiner) and the 65 control characters. The Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) character set contains 65 control codes, including all of the ASCII control codes plus ...
In a broader sense, other non-printing format characters, such as those used in bidirectional text, are also referred to as control characters by software; [2] these are mostly assigned to the general category Cf (format), used for format effectors introduced and defined by Unicode itself.
The ASCII text-encoding standard uses 7 bits to encode characters. With this it is possible to encode 128 (i.e. 2 7) unique values (0–127) to represent the alphabetic, numeric, and punctuation characters commonly used in English, plus a selection of Control characters which do not represent printable characters.
The exact number of bits can be checked via CHAR_BIT macro. By far the most common size is 8 bits, and the POSIX standard requires it to be 8 bits. [ 8 ] In newer C standards char is required to hold UTF-8 code units [ 6 ] [ 7 ] which requires a minimum size of 8 bits.
HTML and XML provide ways to reference Unicode characters when the characters themselves either cannot or should not be used. A numeric character reference refers to a character by its Universal Character Set/Unicode code point, and a character entity reference refers to a character by a predefined name. A numeric character reference uses the ...
There is another kind of character reference called a character entity reference, which allows a character to be referred to by a name instead of a number. (Naming a character creates a character entity.) HTML defines some character entities, but not many; all other characters can only be included by direct encoding or using NCRs.
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.