U000C

U+000C, commonly referred to as Form Feed (FF), is a control character in Unicode and ASCII. It has no visible glyph and is used to control devices rather than to display text.

In terms of encoding, U+000C is decimal 12 and hexadecimal 0x0C. It belongs to the C0 Controls and Basic Latin block, with the general category Cc (Other Control). As a non-printing character, it does not convey a written symbol on its own.

Historically, the form feed was used to advance paper to the top of the next page in line printers, teletype machines, and other early printing or display devices. In text processing, it served as a page delimiter, signaling a page break in documents prepared for physical printing.

In modern computing, the form feed is usually ignored by standard text rendering and is treated as a control code rather than visible content. Many programming languages represent it with the escape sequence \f inside string literals, and some regular expressions use \f to denote this character as well. In data streams, its handling varies by environment and can trigger page-breaking behavior in certain printers or specialized software, but it is not commonly used for everyday text formatting.

Unicode designation and behavior position U+000C as a control character rather than a printable symbol. It remains part of the repertoire of C0 controls and is preserved mainly for compatibility with legacy systems and data interchange.

See also: ASCII, Unicode, C0 Controls, Form Feed.