Meta-character
Term used to describe a character or characters that perform a function. For example, "\n" is often used as a meta-character for a new line and "\t" is often used to represent a tab. Meta-characters are often used in computer programming to match the meta-characters. For example, in the below example, the below Perl regular expression would locate any new lines and delete them to combine all the data.
$data =~ s/\n//;
Also see: Character, Escape, Meta-data, Programming definitions, Regular expression, Wildcard