Part of Series: Linux Commands
Linux

Reference: Non Printable Characters List

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Non printable characters on Linux, MacOS or Windows are characters which do not represent a symbol, character, or number which is part of the text of the document, but rather are used for things like character encoding. A full list of all non-printable characters along with their decimal and hexidecimal codes are shown below.

How to find non-printable characters in a file

If you need to see all nonprintable characters in a document, you can use cat -v filename.txt in terminal to find them, where filename.txt is the file you want to show. The contents of the file, along with the non-printable characters in caret notation will be shown in your terminal window.

For a full list of the caret notation for non-printable characters, see the list below.

Full Non Printable Characters List

Below, find a list of all non printable characters, along with their binary, decimal and hexadecimal codes. You can also find their escape sequence (used in many programming languages), and caret notation (used with cat -v).

Name Binary Decimal Hexadecimal Octal Caret Notation Escape Sequence
Null 000 0000 0 00 000 ^@ \0
Start of Heading (SOH) 000 0001 1 01 001 ^A
Start of Text (STX) 000 0010 2 02 002 ^B
End of Text (ETX) 000 0011 3 03 003 ^C
End of Transmission (EOT) 000 0100 4 04 004 ^D
Enquiry (ENQ) 000 0101 5 05 005 ^E
Acknowledgement (ACK) 000 0110 6 06 006 ^F
Beep (BEL) 000 0111 7 07 007 ^G \a
Backspace (BS) 000 1000 8 08 010 ^H \b
Horizontal Tab (HT) 000 1001 9 09 011 ^I \t
Line Feed (LF) 000 1010 10 0A 012 ^J \n
Vertical Tab (VT) 000 1011 11 0B 013 ^K \v
Form Feed (FF) 000 1100 12 0C 014 ^L \f
Carriage Return (CR) 000 1101 13 0D 015 ^M \r
Shift Out (SO) 000 1110 14 0E 016 ^N
Shift In (SI) 000 1111 15 0F 017 ^O
Data Link Escape (DLE) 001 0000 16 10 020 ^P
Device Control 1 (DC1, often XON) 001 0001 17 11 021 ^Q
Device Control 2 (DC2) 001 0010 18 12 022 ^R
Device Control 3 (DC3, often XOFF) 001 0011 19 13 023 ^S
Device Control 4 (DC4) 001 0100 20 14 024 ^T
Negative Acknowledgement (NAK) 001 0101 21 15 025 ^U
Synchronous Idle (SYN) 001 0110 22 16 026 ^V
End of Transmission Block (ETB) 001 0111 23 17 027 ^W
Cancel (CAN) 001 1000 24 18 030 ^X
End of Medium (EM) 001 1001 25 19 031 ^Y
Substitute (SUB) 001 1010 26 1A 032 ^Z
Escape (ESC) 001 1011 27 1B 033 ^[ \e
File Separator (FS) 001 1100 28 1C 034 ^\
Group Separator (GS) 001 1101 29 1D 035 ^]
Record Separator (RS) 001 1110 30 1E 036 ^^
Unit Separator (US) 001 1111 31 1F 037 ^_
Delete (DEL) 111 1111 127 7F 177 ^?
Last Updated 1647250995182

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