escape character

A character which indicates that the following character, normally interpreted by a program, is to be printed as a literal character instead. Usually programs which handle user input (such as text editors and shells) have some characters which have special interpreted meanings. The escape character is used in conjunction with the interpreted character to escape or ignore the interpreted meaning. The ASCII escape character is a non-printing character with value of ASCII 27. In 4GL, the backlash ( \ ) symbol can be used as an escape character: the string \\ would indicate that the backslash character is to be sent.

See also ASCII, character, printable character, shell, text editor.