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Comment by co_dh | Hacker News Reader

How do you enter them ? in console, in editor? Since they are invisible, how do you find if you have entered a wrong character?

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You can type them in console and vim with

    File separator - C-v C-\
    Group separator - C-v C-5
    Record separator - C-v C-6
    Unit separator - C-v C-7

They are all visible characters in both vim and emacs by default.

You can see them on the terminal with `cat -v`

It would be nice if more tools were built to take advantage of these characters, but there are some that do.

In Emacs, one way to enter these characters is to use `M-x ucs-insert` and then enter the hex code of the separator:

    M-x ucs-insert 1c
    M-x ucs-insert 1d
    M-x ucs-insert 1e
    M-x ucs-insert 1f

for file, group, record, and unit separators. Is there an easier way?

C-q (quoted-insert) will insert the next input character ignoring any other bindings. So: C-q C-\ C-q C-] C-q C-^ C-q C-_

At the shell, ^V^_ produces US, and ^V^^ produces RS. Each control character has an associated character for this reason. Most programs will display them in reverse text or with the leading caret.

Anyone who got used to using ^[ for escape in vi would already be familiar with this approach.

All valid questions, all valid reasons they never caught on.

> Since they are invisible, how do you find if you have entered a wrong character?

    od -c

You would tell emacs to render them as a visible character or format the data as a table.

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