Control character

Your writing holds a control character: one of the invisible characters that once told a printer or a terminal what to do, such as a vertical tab, U+000B. They usually arrive with text pasted from a word processor, which marks a line break inside a paragraph with one, or with text saved in an old encoding. Statac leaves the character out of the page and tells you where it was.

The message draws the character where you can see it: ␋ for a vertical tab, ␀ to ␟ for the others in that range, ␡ for U+007F, and <U+0092> for one between U+0080 and U+009F.

What you’ll see

warning  Control character: U+000B is left out of the page
  Delete it, or type the character you meant.
  More: https://statac.dev/e/control-character/

In the terminal the message also names the file and line where there is one, and marks the exact text.

Why Statac warns

A reader sees nothing where a control character stands, and HTML reads one as a mistake in the page, so leaving it out changes nothing a reader can see. It is left out in code too: a reader copying the code would copy a character they can’t see. Statac tells you because the character may stand for one you meant to type.

The tab and the line endings are the only control characters your writing keeps.

How to fix it

Delete the character. Where it stood for something, type that instead:

• A vertical tab from a word processor marks a line break. End the line with a backslash, \, to break it there, or start a new paragraph.
• A character between U+0080 and U+009F is usually one saved in an old encoding: U+0092 stood for ’ and U+009C for œ. Type the character you meant.

A character written as an HTML reference, such as , is HTML you wrote on purpose, and Statac leaves it in.

Example

In content/post-1.md, an apostrophe saved in an old encoding is drawn in the message as Qu<U+0092>un, and Statac publishes Quun. Type the apostrophe again:

Qu’un

Its name

Name	control-character
In the terminal	statac explain control-character
To stop showing it	quiet: [control-character] in statac.yaml, once you have understood it. Statac still counts it.