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

Just to add to the confusion, I've been working on a simple text editor using a TextArea element in an HTML page in a browser. In anticipation of compatibility woes with respect to CR/LF, I wrote the code to check the platform, and use whichever newline convention was applicable to the platform.

However, I discovered something interesting when checking the actual characters contained in the TextArea, via a small JavaScript function that generates the hex data corresponding to the characters.

For the test, I typed in the following text:

Hello, World[enter]

Goodbye, Cruel World[enter]

When I examined the text data, the byte sequence I obtained was this:

48 65 6c 6c 6f 2c 20 57 6f 72 6c 64 0a 47 6f 6f 64 62 79 65 2c 20 43 72 75 65 6c 20 57 6f 72 6c 64 0a

Now, most people looking at this, and seeing 0a but no 0d bytes, would think that this output was obtained on a Unix/Linux platform. But, here's the rub: this sequence I obtained in Google Chrome on Windows 7 64-bit.

So, if you're using a TextArea element and examining the text, CHECK the output as I've done above, to make sure what actual character bytes are returned from your TextArea. I've yet to see if this differs on other platforms or other browsers, but it's worth bearing in mind if you're performing text processing via JavaScript, and you need to make that text processing platform independent.

The conventions covered in above posts apply to console output, but HTML elements, it appears, adhere to the UNIX/Linux convention. Unless someone discovers otherwise on a different platform/browser.