Member Avatar for LieAfterLie

For some reason, newline characters seem to be using 2 bytes in text files instead of one. Is this normal? When I open a text file and look at the size, I get one more for every character I add, except for newlines, which add 2 bytes.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by John A
Member Avatar for Ancient Dragon

The new line in the text file is operating-system dependent. *nix uses '\n', MAC uses '\r', and MS-DOS/MS-Windows uses two characters "\r\n". Which is why text files that are transferred between operating systems are often run through a translator to convert from one format to another.

Member Avatar for LieAfterLie

ahh, carriage return... What exactly does \r do in text files? How is that typically interpreted by the font? I think in terminals, it goes back to the beginning of the line without going down to a new one, but I've seen it displayed differently in different terminals. Some will need both, and some automatically do the newline when they display a \r.

Member Avatar for Ancient Dragon

It has little, if anything, to do with terminals. Just a method of terminating a text line in text files. I don't know why MAC and MS-DOS didn't follow *nix's lead and just save '\n' in the text file -- would seem the logical thing to do since most (but not necessarily all) lines read by fgets() terminate with '\n'. MAC and MS-DOS/MS-Windows os just have to do a little extra work to maintain that standard.

Member Avatar for John A

I don't know why MAC and MS-DOS didn't follow *nix's lead and just save '\n' in the text file -- would seem the logical thing to do since most (but not necessarily all) lines read by fgets() terminate with '\n'. MAC and MS-DOS/MS-Windows os just have to do a little extra work to maintain that standard.

I do believe that Mac OS X uses just \n now, as it's using the FreeBSD kernel as the underlying technology for the operating system, and because of that, is POSIX-compliant.

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