Difference between \n and \r?

Question

What’s the difference between \\n (newline) and \\r (carriage return)?

In particular, are there any practical differences between

Answer 1

In windows, the \n moves to the beginning of the next line. The \r moves to the beginning of the current line, without moving to the next line. I have used \r in my own console apps where I am testing out some code and I don't want to see text scrolling up my screen, so rather than use \n after printing out some text, of say, a frame rate (FPS), I will printf("%-10d\r", fps); This will return the cursor to the beginning of the line without moving down to the next line and allow me to have other information on the screen that doesn't get scrolled off while the framerate constantly updates on the same line (the %-10 makes certain the output is at least 10 characters, left justified so it ends up padded by spaces, overwriting any old values for that line). It's quite handy for stuff like this, usually when I have debugging stuff output to my console screen.

A little history

The /r stands for "return" or "carriage return" which owes it's history to the typewriter. A carriage return moved your carriage all the way to the right so you were typing at the start of the line.

The /n stands for "new line", again, from typewriter days you moved down to a new line. Not nessecarily to the start of it though, which is why some OSes adopted the need for both a /r return followed by a /n newline, as that was the order a typewriter did it in. It also explains the old 8bit computers that used to have "Return" rather than "Enter", from "carriage return", which was familiar.