The End-of-Text character (ETX) is a

control character In computing and telecommunication, a control character or non-printing character (NPC) is a code point (a number) in a character set, that does not represent a written symbol. They are used as in-band signaling to cause effects other than the ...

used to inform the receiving computer that the end of a record has been reached. This may or may not be an indication that all of the data in a record have been received. In

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

and in

EBCDIC Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC; ) is an eight- bit character encoding used mainly on IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computer operating systems. It descended from the code used with punched cards and the corresponding ...

, ETX is

code point In character encoding terminology, a code point, codepoint or code position is a numerical value that maps to a specific character. Code points usually represent a single grapheme—usually a letter, digit, punctuation mark, or whitespace—but ...

0x03, often displayed as {{mono, ^C). It is often used as a "break" character (

Control-C Control+C is a common computer command. It is generated by pressing the key while holding down the key on most computer keyboards. In graphical user interface environments that use the control key to control the active program, control+C is o ...

) to interrupt a program or process. In

TOPS-20 The TOPS-20 operating system by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) is a proprietary OS used on some of DEC's 36-bit mainframe computers. The Hardware Reference Manual was described as for "DECsystem-10/DECSYSTEM-20 Processor" (meaning the DEC PDP- ...

, it was used to gain the system's attention before logging in. It is often used in conjunction with Start of Text (STX) and

Data Link Escape The C0 and C1 control code or control character sets define control codes for use in text by computer systems that use ASCII and derivatives of ASCII. The codes represent additional information about the text, such as the position of a cursor, ...

(DLE), e.g., to distinguish frames in the

Data link layer The data link layer, or layer 2, is the second layer of the seven-layer OSI model of computer networking. This layer is the protocol layer that transfers data between nodes on a network segment across the physical layer. The data link layer p ...

mIRC mIRC is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client for Windows, created in 1995. It is a fully functional chat utility and its integrated scripting language makes it extensible and versatile. mIRC has been described as "one of the most popular IRC cl ...

uses ETX as the color character

escape character In computing and telecommunication, an escape character is a character (computing), character that invokes an alternative interpretation on the following characters in a character sequence. An escape character is a particular case of metacharac ...

See also