DevKits

ASCII 4

End of Transmission (EOT)

Control character

Sent by Ctrl+D at the start of a line to signal EOF on Unix.

Common uses & context

Decimal 4 (0x04) is the End of Transmission 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 EOT produces no letter, digit, or symbol on screen. Its8-bit binary form is 00000100 and its octal value is 0004.

Sent by Ctrl+D at the start of a line to signal EOF on Unix.

BecauseEOT 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 4 (0x04). 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

Decimal4
Hexadecimal0x04
Octal0004
Binary00000100
HTML numeric entity
URL encoding%04
UTF-8 bytes0x04

Code snippets

JavaScript

String.fromCharCode(4); // "EOT"
4.toString(16); // "04"

Python

chr(4)           # control char EOT
ord(chr(4))      # 4
hex(4)           # '0x04'

HTML

&#4;   <!-- numeric entity (no named entity for this character) -->

Programming notes

  • Detect it by numeric comparison: byte === 4 (0x04). 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 EOT shows as 04; in a "cat -v" style view it may appear as a caret sequence.

Frequently asked questions

What character is ASCII code 4?

ASCII code 4 is End of Transmission (EOT), a non-printing control/whitespace character. In hexadecimal it is 0x04 and in binary 00000100. It has no visible glyph — it controls formatting or hardware instead of drawing a symbol.

What is 0x04 in ASCII?

Hexadecimal 0x04 equals decimal 4, which is theEnd of Transmission control character (EOT). To convert hex to ASCII yourself, read the two hex digits as a base-16 number (0x04 = 4) and look up that code point.

How do I write the character with code 4 in code?

In JavaScript use String.fromCharCode(4); in Python use chr(4); in HTML use the numeric entity &#4;. In a URL it is percent-encoded as %04, and in UTF-8 it is stored as the byte sequence 0x04.

Is ASCII 4 (EOT) printable?

No. EOT (code 4) 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