ASCII 16 — DLE

Data Link Escape (DLE) provides a mechanism for transmitting control character byte values as literal data in transparent mode. When a protocol needs to send bytes that happen to match control codes, DLE precedes them to signal they should be interpreted as data rather than commands. This concept of escaping special characters became foundational to computing — from URL percent-encoding to JSON string escaping to SQL parameterization, the principle DLE established remains essential for reliable data representation in virtually every modern system.

Control characters were defined in the original 1963 ASCII standard to manage telecommunications equipment and terminal devices. Unlike printable characters representing visible symbols, control codes perform actions: initiating transmissions, acknowledging received data, triggering device alerts, and structuring information hierarchically. Of ASCII's 128 code points, 33 are designated as control characters (codes 0–31 plus 127), reflecting the standard's deep roots in telegraphy and serial communication systems. While most control codes have fallen out of daily use, several remain essential to modern computing workflows.

In the ASCII encoding table, Data Link Escape is assigned code point 16 in decimal (0x10 hexadecimal, 020 octal, 00010000 binary). The 7-bit ASCII standard, first published in 1963 by the American Standards Association, defines exactly 128 characters that remain the foundation of text encoding systems worldwide. UTF-8, the dominant encoding on the modern web, is fully backward compatible with ASCII — every ASCII character is encoded as the identical single byte in UTF-8, guaranteeing that Data Link Escape works reliably across all operating systems, programming languages, and internet protocols.