telecommunication Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than that fe ...

, the term cancel character has the following meanings: #A

control character In computing and telecommunication, a control Character (computing), character or non-printing character (NPC) is a code point (a number) in a character encoding, character set, that does not represent a written symbol. They are used as in-band ...

("CAN", "Cancel", U+0018, or ^X) used to indicate that the

data In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted ...

with which it is associated are in

error An error (from the Latin ''error'', meaning "wandering") is an action which is inaccurate or incorrect. In some usages, an error is synonymous with a mistake. The etymology derives from the Latin term 'errare', meaning 'to stray'. In statistics ...

or are to be disregarded. Exact meaning can depend on protocol. For example: #* In some journalistic text transmission formats, it signifies that the preceding word should be deleted; it is sometimes called "Kill Word" ("KW") in this context. #* In some

Videotex Videotex (or interactive videotex) was one of the earliest implementations of an end-user information system. From the late 1970s to early 2010s, it was used to deliver information (usually pages of text) to a user in computer-like format, typi ...

formats, it stops any running macros. In others, it clears the current line after the cursor position (compare ). #A

("CCH", "Cancel Character", U+0094, or ESC T) used to erase the previous character. This character was created as an unambiguous alternative to the much more common backspace character ("BS", U+0008), which has a now mostly obsolete alternative function of causing the following character to be superimposed on the preceding one.

References

* {{reflist Control characters