^H?

[Mark A Mandel]

On Thu, 9 May 2002, David Bergdahl wrote:

#"Clinton (the groovy born-on-the-bayou^H^H^H^H^Hdirt-farm sax
#player)"
#
#^H^H^H is a new one on me!  Any indication of what it means?

It's equivalent to XXXX or ///, crossing out the previous characters. It
represents the backspace character, which can be typed as control-H
and is therefore graphically displayed as ^H in many interfaces.
Prefixing ^ to a letter or other ASCII character is a conventional way
of representing the control character obtained by subtracting (decimal)
32 from its ASCII code.

-- Mark A. Mandel