In telecommunication and character encoding, the term cancel character refers to a control character which may be either of:
^X
used to indicate that the data with which it is associated are in error or are to be disregarded. Exact meaning can depend on protocol. For example:
ESC T
used to erase the previous character. This character was created as an unambiguous alternative to the much more common backspace character ("BS", U+0008), which has a now mostly obsolete alternative function of causing the following character to be superimposed on the preceding one.