ASCII 30 — RS

Record Separator (RS) delimits individual records within a group, positioned between GS (group) and US (unit) in the ASCII information separator hierarchy. Conceptually, RS performs the same function as a row boundary in a database table or a line delimiter in a CSV file. Using ASCII separator characters avoids the escaping problems inherent in using commas or tabs as delimiters, since these invisible control codes almost never appear in actual data content, making them ideal unambiguous record boundaries.

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, Record Separator is assigned code point 30 in decimal (0x1E hexadecimal, 036 octal, 00011110 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 Record Separator works reliably across all operating systems, programming languages, and internet protocols.