What does "^L" mean in C?

Question

For example, main in src/hello.c in the GNU Hello package ends like this:

   exit (EXIT_SUCCESS);
 }
 ^L

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55203770/what-does-l-mean-in-c

Answer 1

Literally, it's a page break ("form feed") character. The compiler treats it as ordinary whitespace. But it's very useful for printing source code - it starts a new page (for example, use ^L between functions to force each call to get its own page).

In Vim/vi based editors, you can insert such a character within edit mode by typing Ctrl + V followed by Ctrl + L. It will look like ^L in the editor, but it's actually just one character (ASCII value: 12 or 0x0C).