I'm reading text files but I don't know in advance the kind of line ending used in this file. I need to know whether it uses UNIX \n or windows style \r\n line endings.
What is a reliable and fast way to detect this?
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32answers:
2
+1
A:
From wikipedia:
The file command also detects the type of EOL used:
file myfile.txt
> > myfile.txt: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline#Common_problems
Of course, file would only work on Unix systems. I'm sure someone else will answer one for Windows.
Xavier Ho
2010-04-23 09:18:38
Basically, what I am interested in is, is the way the file command does it. I cannot run a shell command in my use case.
Fabian Jakobs
2010-04-23 09:20:40
@Fabian: I'm curious now. What's your use case? It wouldn't be to break down different lines. Does this have to do with encoding or file types?
Xavier Ho
2010-04-23 09:37:26
I have a textarea in a web browser and I need to split pasted text into separate lines. Further I want to be able to reassemble the text with the original line breaks.
Fabian Jakobs
2010-04-23 09:58:21
+1
A:
Maybe I'm missing a trick, but couldn't you just open the file as binary and read bytes until you see '\n'? If you saw '\r' just before, it's Windows. Otherwise it's Unix.
Simon Nickerson
2010-04-23 09:31:54