The control characters shown in the table below are the only characters other than printable characters that line-sequential files can contain. The hexadecimal values are in EBCDIC.
| Hexadecimal value | Control character |
|---|---|
| X'05' | Horizontal tab |
| X'0B' | Vertical tab |
| X'0C' | Form feed |
| X'0D' | Carriage return |
| X'0E' | DBCS shift-out |
| X'0F' | DBCS shift-in |
| X'15' | Newline |
| X'16' | Backspace |
| X'2F' | Alarm |
The newline character is treated as a record delimiter. The other control characters are treated as data and are part of the record.
related tasks
Defining line-sequential files and records in COBOL