telecommunications Telecommunication, often used in its plural form or abbreviated as telecom, is the transmission of information over a distance using electronic means, typically through cables, radio waves, or other communication technologies. These means of ...

and

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. The numerical v ...

, the term cancel character refers to a

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

which may be either of: #"CAN", "Cancel", U+0018, or ^X used to indicate that the

data Data ( , ) are a collection of discrete or continuous values that convey information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted for ...

with which it is associated are in

error An error (from the Latin , meaning 'to wander'Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “error (n.), Etymology,” September 2023, .) is an inaccurate or incorrect action, thought, or judgement. In statistics, "error" refers to the difference between t ...

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

*{{FS1037C Control characters