How many ASCII control characters are there?

There are 33: the 32 codes from 0 to 31 (the C0 control set) plus DEL at 127. They are non-printing characters that control devices and data streams rather than displaying a glyph.

What is the difference between CR and LF?

Carriage return (CR, 13, \r) returns the cursor to the start of the line, while line feed (LF, 10, \n) moves down one line. Unix uses LF for newlines, classic Mac used CR, and Windows uses CR LF together.

What is caret notation?

Caret notation writes a control code as a caret (^) followed by a printable letter, representing the Ctrl key combination that produces it. For example ^C is ETX (3), ^I is tab (9), and ^M is carriage return (13).

What is the DEL character?

DEL is decimal 127 (0x7F). Historically it punched out all the holes on paper tape to "delete" a character. It sits outside the 0-31 C0 range but is still treated as a control character.

Is anything I search uploaded?

No. The full list of control codes and the search both run entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere.

ASCII Control Codes Reference

This is a searchable reference for the 33 ASCII control characters — the non-printing codes that direct terminals, printers and data streams rather than displaying a glyph. It is built for programmers, sysadmins and anyone debugging serial output, terminal escape sequences or text-encoding issues, where knowing exactly what ^C, \n or 0x1B means saves time.

How it works

The control set covers codes 0 to 31 (the C0 control set) plus DEL at 127. Each row in the table gives the decimal and hexadecimal value, the standard abbreviation, the caret notation (the Ctrl-key combination), any C-style escape sequence, the full name, and a plain-English description of its purpose. You can search by decimal value, abbreviation (like LF), name, or escape sequence (like \n) to jump straight to a code. The caret column maps keystrokes to codes — pressing Ctrl with a letter sends the corresponding control character.

Example

The most commonly referenced control codes:

Dec	Hex	Abbr	Caret	Escape	Meaning
0	00	NUL	^@	\0	Null
9	09	HT	^I	\t	Horizontal tab
10	0A	LF	^J	\n	Line feed (Unix newline)
13	0D	CR	^M	\r	Carriage return
27	1B	ESC	^[	\e	Escape
127	7F	DEL	^?		Delete

Note that Unix uses LF for newlines, classic Mac used CR, and Windows uses CR LF together. Everything runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.