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ETX

What the heck is this ^C or ETX thing that you keep putting at the end of your posts??

Glad you asked! The ^ is a character that means the "ctrl" key on your keyboard. You might be aware that computers don't encode information in the same way as humans. Rather than draw the glyph A (capitol A), a computer might use the ASCII encoding scheme to store that as the number 65. Of course, it also doesn't use base-10 to store this. It's actually stored as the binary 1000001. You can use Python to see this for yourself:

>>> ord('A')
65
>>> bin(65)
'0b1000001'
          

You might have guessed that `C` is 1000011, or 67. And by now you might be thinking, "Hey wait a minute, what about 0-64?" because it's kind of silly to start A at 65 if you could start it at 0 or 1 instead. Well, ASCII actually defines the first several characters as control characters. They're not for displaying text, they're for controlling the computer or the text streams. The first few are:

• NUL (null)
• SOH (start of heading)
• STX (start of text)
• ETX (end of text)
• EOT (end of transmission)

If you're a counting type you might realize that computers that count starting at 0, and people would say that A = 1, you might have put something like

0. ? - NUL (null) (if you're wondering -- this is ^@)
1. A - SOH (start of heading)
2. B - STX (start of text)
3. C - ETX (end of text)
4. D - EOT (end of transmission)

Thus, when you see ^C then you should interpret it as "ETX", or "End of text". I could *really* put the actual byte 011 at the end of my HTML pages, but it's likely that none of your web browsers would display it or correctly interpret it. But you can mentally translate ^C to "end of text" now, so you know that my post is really done when you see ^C.

^C