Writing "hello\3\0" to a socket returns 0x03. What is this and is that expected?

Interprocess communication | Developing | kdb+ and q documentation - kdb+ and q documentation

After a client has opened a socket to the server, it sends a null-terminated ASCII string "username:password\N" where \N is a single byte which represents the client’s capability with respect to compression, timestamp|timespan and UUID, e.g. "myname:mypassword\3" .