A non-printable character is a character that doesn’t have a corresponding character letter to its corresponding ascii code. Examples would be the linefeed, which is ascii character code 10 decimal, the carriage return, which is 13 decimal, or the bell sound, which is decimal 7. On a pc, you can often add non-printable characters by holding down the alt key, and typing in the decimal value (i.e., alt-007 gets you a bell). There are other character encoding schemes, but ascii is the most prevalent.