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).
For the list of non printable characters with full names, please see the original article here.
Name | Binary | Dec | Hex | Octal | Caret | Esc Sequence |
--------------------------------------------------------------
Null | 000 0000 | 0 | 00 | 000 | ^@ | \0 |
SOH | 000 0001 | 1 | 01 | 001 | ^A | |
STX | 000 0010 | 2 | 02 | 002 | ^B | |
ETX | 000 0011 | 3 | 03 | 003 | ^C | |
EOT | 000 0100 | 4 | 04 | 004 | ^D | |
ENQ | 000 0101 | 5 | 05 | 005 | ^E | |
ACK | 000 0110 | 6 | 06 | 006 | ^F | |
BEL | 000 0111 | 7 | 07 | 007 | ^G | \a |
BS | 000 1000 | 8 | 08 | 010 | ^H | \b |
HT | 000 1001 | 9 | 09 | 011 | ^I | \t |
LF | 000 1010 | 10 | 0A | 012 | ^J | \n |
VT | 000 1011 | 11 | 0B | 013 | ^K | \v |
FF | 000 1100 | 12 | 0C | 014 | ^L | \f |
CR | 000 1101 | 13 | 0D | 015 | ^M | \r |
SO | 000 1110 | 14 | 0E | 016 | ^N | |
SI | 000 1111 | 15 | 0F | 017 | ^O | |
DEL | 001 0000 | 16 | 10 | 020 | ^P | |
DC1 | 001 0001 | 17 | 11 | 021 | ^Q | |
DC2 | 001 0010 | 18 | 12 | 022 | ^R | |
DC3 | 001 0011 | 19 | 13 | 023 | ^S | |
DC4 | 001 0100 | 20 | 14 | 024 | ^T | |
NAK | 001 0101 | 21 | 15 | 025 | ^U | |
SYN | 001 0110 | 22 | 16 | 026 | ^V | |
ETB | 001 0111 | 23 | 17 | 027 | ^W | |
CAN | 001 1000 | 24 | 18 | 030 | ^X | |
EM | 001 1001 | 25 | 19 | 031 | ^Y | |
SUB | 001 1010 | 26 | 1A | 032 | ^Z | |
ESC | 001 1011 | 27 | 1B | 033 | ^[ | \e |
FS | 001 1100 | 28 | 1C | 034 | ^\ | |
GS | 001 1101 | 29 | 1D | 035 | ^] | |
RS | 001 1110 | 30 | 1E | 036 | ^^ | |
US | 001 1111 | 31 | 1F | 037 | ^_ | |
DEL | 111 1111 | 127 | 7F | 177 | ^? | |
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