Group Separator

The Group Separator symbol was used in computer terminals, printers, text processing systems, and telecommunication equipment. Its main purpose was to indicate the boundary between groups of data in a one stream.

It also served to separate groups of information in data streams. It allowed devices and programs to determine the boundaries between different groups of data and process them accordingly. This was particularly useful in processing structured data, which consisted of multiple groups or blocks of information.

When it comes to modern computer systems and applications, the U+001D symbol is rarely used there. It happens so because now other mechanisms, protocols (markup languages such as XML, JSON) and specialized data formats are used for the same purpose.

Like many other control symbols, this one has no visible representation and doesn't occupy a lot of space on screen or in typed text. However, there is a separate symbol in Control Pictures2400–243F representing the graphical image of Group Separator as the abbreviation GS — ␝ .

The symbol “Group Separator” is included in the “C0 controls” subblock of the “Basic Latin” block and was approved as part of Unicode version 1.1 in 1993.