recognizing control characters

Question

On my Linux box it shows up as ^A, CTRL-A when i vi the file. While writing a C program, how should i reference it? How can i find out a numeric value of it?

Answer 1

Control characters are 0x40 less than their character. A is 65, so ^A is 1.

Answer 2

This should help?

http://www.robelle.com/smugbook/ascii.html

Otherwise, you could always just read in the file and output that particular char as a value to see what it is.