DevKits

ASCII 19

Device Control 3 (XOFF) (DC3)

Control character

Software flow control: pause transmission. Ctrl+S on terminals — will freeze your screen if you press it accidentally.

Common uses & context

Decimal 19 (0x13) is the Device Control 3 (XOFF) control character — one of the 33 non-printing codes in the C0 control block (0–31 plus DEL at 127). Control characters were designed to command teletype and terminal hardware rather than to represent visible glyphs, so DC3 produces no letter, digit, or symbol on screen. Its8-bit binary form is 00010011 and its octal value is 0023.

Software flow control: pause transmission. Ctrl+S on terminals — will freeze your screen if you press it accidentally.

BecauseDC3 is invisible, it is easiest to work with by its numeric code. In most languages you can produce it with the escape or code-point form shown below, and detect it by comparing a byte against 19 (0x13). When it turns up unexpectedly in text — pasted from a terminal, a legacy file, or a binary blob — it is usually the cause of "invisible character" bugs that break parsing or comparisons.

All encodings at a glance

Decimal19
Hexadecimal0x13
Octal0023
Binary00010011
HTML numeric entity
URL encoding%13
UTF-8 bytes0x13

Code snippets

JavaScript

String.fromCharCode(19); // "DC3"
19.toString(16); // "13"

Python

chr(19)           # control char DC3
ord(chr(19))      # 19
hex(19)           # '0x13'

HTML

&#19;   <!-- numeric entity (no named entity for this character) -->

Programming notes

  • Detect it by numeric comparison: byte === 19 (0x13). It has no printable glyph to match on.
  • Control characters below 32 are stripped or rejected by many text validators — check for them when sanitizing user input.
  • In a hex dump DC3 shows as 13; in a "cat -v" style view it may appear as a caret sequence.

Frequently asked questions

What character is ASCII code 19?

ASCII code 19 is Device Control 3 (XOFF) (DC3), a non-printing control/whitespace character. In hexadecimal it is 0x13 and in binary 00010011. It has no visible glyph — it controls formatting or hardware instead of drawing a symbol.

What is 0x13 in ASCII?

Hexadecimal 0x13 equals decimal 19, which is theDevice Control 3 (XOFF) control character (DC3). To convert hex to ASCII yourself, read the two hex digits as a base-16 number (0x13 = 19) and look up that code point.

How do I write the character with code 19 in code?

In JavaScript use String.fromCharCode(19); in Python use chr(19); in HTML use the numeric entity &#19;. In a URL it is percent-encoded as %13, and in UTF-8 it is stored as the byte sequence 0x13.

Is ASCII 19 (DC3) printable?

No. DC3 (code 19) is a control character with no visible glyph. It instructs software or hardware rather than displaying a symbol, which is why it often appears as an invisible or replacement character when it leaks into ordinary text.

Nearby codes

Encode & convert this character