NCPDP telecommunication format relies on non-printable ASCII characters to denote segments and fields.
NCPDP batch standard adds several more non-printable separators to indicate the start/end of transactions and headers/trailers. This is needed to package multiple NCPDP telco transactions in the same file.
Non-printable characters are shown as spaces in all browsers and in many text editors. This makes it difficult to work with text containing hidden characters. To solve this problem, more advanced editors and IDEs show small symbols representing non-printable characters, such as ␞ and ␜.