ANSI escape code (or escape sequences) is the method of in-band signaling to control formatting, color, and other output options on video text terminals.
To encode this formatting information, it embeds certain sequences of bytes into the text, which have to be interpreted specially, not as codes of characters. Although hardware text terminals have become increasingly rare in the 21st century, the relevance of this standard persists because most terminal emulators interpret at least some of the ANSI escape sequences in the output text. One notable exception is the win32 console component of Microsoft Windows.
