Question

I a reading Kerninghan and Ritchie’s C programming language book and on page 37 it mentions byte sized bit patterns like :

'\013' for vertical tab .

'\007' for bell character .

My doubts :

1. What is byte sized in it and and what’s a bit pattern ?
2. What relevance does this hold and where can I apply it ?
3. Is it in any sense related to escape sequences ?

I can’t seem to find any information what so ever about these byte sized bit patterns on the web . please help . thanks .

Answer 1

1. A byte is 8 bits. See here
2. A bit pattern is the bits that make up the data. E.g. The octal value (i.e. '\007) is converted to the bit pattern (most significant bit first) would be 0000 0111. '\013' would be the bit pattern 0000 1011
3. You typically use these escape sequences for non-printable characters.
4. '\007' is an escape sequence. So is '\\'.