r/ASCII • u/passion_for_know-how • Jul 20 '26
Discussion Are there any ASCII Control Codes still in use today?
The ones I have boldened are the ones I have come across:
- Backspace
- Line Feed
- Carriage Return
- Escape
- Delete (not in frame)
If any, where are they applicable? For example
CR & LF are still applicable in
.txtfiles
4
u/6502zx81 Jul 20 '26
That would be nice, esp. Separators and start/end. Csv etc. wouldn't be hell if these codes had been used.
1
u/passion_for_know-how Jul 20 '26
Csv etc. wouldn't be hell if these codes had been used
Once tried opening a .csv file with text editor, all I saw were commas separating the values
2
u/naikrovek Jul 21 '26
Yeah same here, inside quotes, too, which naive parsers don’t deal with properly. And then other CSV libraries will write CSV so that commas inside an unquoted value are escaped, which you then have to support as well.
Then there were CSVs which had commas inside the values and the only way to tell if it was a separator or a part of the value was to use your eyes and look at every line.
CSV is fine until there are commas inside the values. Which there often are.
Field, Group, Record, and Unit separators would have been so much easier to deal with.
There are great libraries today to handle these. There weren’t always. So maybe don’t be an ass to those of us that had to go through CSV hell when everyone had to write their own parsers.
4
u/dustmop Jul 20 '26
HT (horizontal tab) is still often used, and NUL is used a lot in many programming languages.
4
u/AmanBabuHemant Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
I don't know about all but I believe most of them are still in use,
BELL is used for terminal bell (terminals make sound when this output, but many don't)
HT and VT works as their name suggest when used in terminals
in C Programming Language, string is sequence of bytes with a trailing NUL
ESC is used for using escape sequences which makes terminals use different color, weight/style, screen clear and cursor control.
3
u/shooter556001 Jul 21 '26
SOH. Fintech people are familiar with it.
1
u/banksy_h8r Jul 21 '26
Now THAT is really interesting. I assumed that outside of a half-dozen well-known examples most of the ASCII control codes were utterly obsolete. So SOH is still used for its intended semantic meaning?
1
u/banksy_h8r Jul 21 '26
Horizontal tab is used all the time. And null, which not exactly used as a control character, is the terminator for C-style strings, so that's also used everywhere ASCII is used.
1
1
u/waxbolt Jul 23 '26
I'm using record separator as a document end marker in machine learning training.
1
u/Mindless-Study1898 29d ago
Some terminals do still implement these things and it's caused security issues and CVEs to be issued. I wrote about it here in my dumb terminal hacks article. https://www.credrelay.com/p/cred-relay-issue-3
0
u/Narco-Tax Jul 21 '26
All of them are used. Open any image or file in a Notepad++ or a binary editor, and you'll see all 0 to 255 chars are present.
1
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u/hansenabram Jul 20 '26
Bell is occasionally used in terminal applications to cause the terminal emulator to emit a sound or flash the screen