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What is the universal newline for all operating systems? (LF and CR)

Answer 1

+7 A:

There is no universal newline for all operating systems. You have to use linefeed on some, carriage return on others, and both on some others.

Most text editors can handle multiple kinds of line endings - check your documentation. There are also plenty of utilities that can translate line endings for you.

Carl Norum 2010-09-15 18:30:19

Answer 2

+1 A:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline

Accordingly you have to write $0D for MacOS up to version 9 and $0A for MacOS X.

splash 2010-09-15 18:33:32

+1 for wikipedia

Jeroen Pluimers 2010-09-16 12:02:38

Answer 3

+15 A:

For Windows, it is CRLF
For UNIX, it is LF
For MAC (up through version 9) it was CR
For MAC OS X, it is LF

The simple fact is that it is different for all operating systems. There is no "universal" newline. The best you can do is be aware of the differences.

Stargazer712 2010-09-15 18:35:56

The only "universal" newline fact is that there is no such thing as LFCR. This fact can be abused to be able to process files from all 3 operating systems: first check if it's LF otherwise if it's CR check if the next character is LF.

slebetman 2010-09-15 18:49:00

Nearly true - but there are systems that don't use any combination of CR or LF for line ends. Certainly there are systems that use EBCDIC and other non-ASCII-related character sets. There are even some systems, I believe (perhaps someone can confirm?), that use ASCII but use a more sophisticated data structure for text files than a simple sequence of character codes, so there are no line-end characters at all.

Steve314 2010-09-15 19:44:23

+1 for mentioning there is no universal way; you should have mentioned http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline as there are more than the 4 examples than you mentioned

Jeroen Pluimers 2010-09-16 12:03:29

Answer 4

+2 A:

Instead of "universal newline" you could write a "universal format" such as JSON, XML, PDF etc depending if your output is destined to be used as data for another program or a report document to be read by humans.

drewk 2010-09-15 18:38:41

Answer 5

+3 A:

In the system unit there is a global variable DefaultTextLineBreakStyle set based on the OS. It can be tlbsLF or tlbsCRLF. If it is tlbsLF, use #10, if it is tlbsCRLF use #13 #10.

From system:

type
  TTextLineBreakStyle = (tlbsLF, tlbsCRLF);

var   { Text output line break handling.  Default value for all text files }
  DefaultTextLineBreakStyle: TTextLineBreakStyle = 
  {$IFDEF LINUX} tlbsLF {$ENDIF}
  {$IFDEF MSWINDOWS} tlbsCRLF {$ENDIF}
  {$IFDEF MACOS} tlbsLF {$ENDIF};

I just wonder why it's a var and not a const.

Gamecat 2010-09-15 18:51:58

Also in the System unit there is a sLineBreak constant that is defined as {$IFDEF LINUX} #10 {$ENDIF} {$IFDEF MSWINDOWS} #13#10 {$ENDIF}.

Alan Clark 2010-09-15 19:34:01

It's a variable so that you can write a Linux program that processes Windows text files, for example; simply assign a new value to that variable, and everything else works normally.

Rob Kennedy 2010-09-15 20:03:44

Sounds reasonable to me.

Gamecat 2010-09-15 20:16:44

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What is the universal newline for all operating systems? (LF and CR)

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