What ␝ means
It marks a group boundary in structured data.
ASCII, a text-encoding standard, listed GS among four information separators by October 1969. FS, GS, RS and US mark file, group, record and unit boundaries, in order.
ECMA-48's control standard left meanings application-specific in 1991. A 2007 U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) biometric-data draft used GS between fields, RS between repeated entries and US between items.
Technical notation that makes an invisible data boundary visible.
␝ is printable notation; software expecting GS needs the control character.
Part of the collection
Related characters
3
Questions people ask
1Why does ␝ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
More like this
8
How to type or find ␝
- Also called
- GS · ASCII GS · control-]
- Search it as
- GS control · data delimiter · control picture · nonprinting control
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
␝\241DCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.