noun

• A character that does not represent a printable character but serves to initiate a particular action.

  ‘Unicode, like ASCII, assigns a unique number to each letter, number, symbol and control character.’

  More example sentences

  • ‘You may also run across hand-edited neutral data files that are missing large sections, contain control characters, and so on.’
  • ‘They were used for control characters, like 7 which made your computer beep and 12 which caused the current page of paper to go flying out of the printer and a new one to be fed in.’
  • ‘There is a table of control characters indicating what they do.’