Text Editor which shows /r/n?

Question

I'm looking for a text editor that can show me the actual carriage returns and newlines.

E.g. if I save this string: "This\rIs\r\nA\nString"

Instead of showing

This
Is
A
String

I'm looking for some text editor which will show

This\rIs\r\nA\nString

I believe a problem with my text-file parsing in a certain program is being caused by inconsistent newline/carriage return/both on the ends of lines.

I could just make a program which can read a file and display it with that formatting, but I figured it'd be easier if anyone knew of one that can already do it.

Thanks!

[EDIT]
Forgot to specify I'm on Windows, and installing Cygwin isn't really an option. Otherwise I would use vi or vim.
Also, if there's a way to do this in PSPad, which is already installed, it would be awesome if you knew that too. Thanks!

Answer 1

I'd bet that Programmer's Notepad would give you something like that...

Answer 2

With Notepad++, you can show end-of-line characters. It shows CR and LF, instead of "\r" and "\n", but it gets the point across. However, it will still insert the line breaks. But you do get to see the line-ending characters.

To use Notepad++ for this, open the View menu, open the Show Symbols slide out, and select either "Show all characters" or "Show end-of-line characters".

Answer 3

Try Notepad++. It shows all characters. In addition, you could use the utility dos2unix to convert a file to all /n, or "conv" (same link) to convert either way.

Answer 4

vi can show all characters.

Answer 5

In vi(m), check out:

:help 'list'
:help 'listchars'

Answer 6

I am a huge fan of JEdit. It's very powerful, and cross-platform. There's a plugin available for it called Whitespace which can do what you want. If that's not enough, there's a hex viewing plugin and a hex editing plugin.

Answer 7

EmEditor does this. You can also customize what symbols actually display to show them.

Answer 8

GVIM runs in windows, and there is VIM for cmd.

Check http://www.vim.org/download.php

--Also a quick look though the docs or google, or some vimmy friends can help you to use VIM's quick search and replace to fix the problem you are having I believe.

Answer 9

Write a small program that does the trick. Depending on the language you use it takes between 10 seconds to 1 min. Faster than installing any application for sure. In command line with proper setup PHP

php -q

<?php $t=file_get_contents("filename"); echo str_replace(array("\n", "\r"), array("\\n", "\\r"), $t); ?>

Answer 10

If you have Mathematica, you can try with this command:

ReadList["filename.txt", Record, RecordSeparators -> {}] // InputForm

That will show all the /r and /n

Answer 11

SciTE does that very well with a single keystroke. It is also able to detect the most probably current line ending of the file (in case of mixed lines) and to convert them.
No need to install, lightweight, it can be used as a tool even if you don't want to give up your favorite editor.

Answer 12

On the Windows platform the Zeus editor has an option to display white space (i.e. View, White sapce menu).

It also has an option to display the file in hex mode (i.e. Tools, Hex Dump menu).

Answer 13

Slickedit and Notepad2 also show them. In Slickedit you can customize all sorts of invisible characters (whitespace, tabs, CRs, line feeds, ...) and display them with any character you wish.