Control characters

Not all the characters in a text file are things you can see when they are printed. Instead they indicate a different purpose.

Some common ones are shown here. You don’t need to remember them, but it helps you understand how text files work to realise these are just characters: they are non-printable characters. They have a number, but it doesn’t result in a symbol you can see (or the computer can print).

These are sometimes considered to be “invisible characters” (which includes space and tab).

The display column here is not universal: by definition these characters are not displayed at all. But some programs represent them in this way, when indicating that they are there.