Control Characters
A control character is a character that, in isolation, has some control function, such as carriage return (CR). Escape sequences, by contrast, consist of an escape character or sequence which changes the interpretation of following characters.
A common use of escape sequences is in fact to remove control characters found in a binary data stream so that they will not cause their control function by mistake. In this case, the control character is replaced by a defined "escape character" (which need not be the US-ASCII Escape Character) and another character; after exiting the context where the control character would have caused an action, the sequence is recognized and replaced by the removed character. To transmit the "escape character" itself, two copies are sent.
The earlier VT52 terminal used simple digraph commands like escape-A: in isolation, "A" simply meant the letter "A", but as part of the escape sequence "escape-A", it had a different meaning. The VT52 also supported parameters: it was not a straightforward control language encoded as substitution.
Read more about this topic: Escape Sequence
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