Difference between CR LF, LF and CR line break types?

Question

I\'d like to know the difference (with examples if possible) between CR LF (Windows), LF (Unix) and CR (Macintosh) line break types.

Answer 1

This is a good summary I found:

The Carriage Return (CR) character (0x0D, \r) moves the cursor to the beginning of the line without advancing to the next line. This character is used as a new line character in Commodore and Early Macintosh operating systems (OS-9 and earlier).

The Line Feed (LF) character (0x0A, \n) moves the cursor down to the next line without returning to the beginning of the line. This character is used as a new line character in UNIX based systems (Linux, Mac OSX, etc)

The End of Line (EOL) sequence (0x0D 0x0A, \r\n) is actually two ASCII characters, a combination of the CR and LF characters. It moves the cursor both down to the next line and to the beginning of that line. This character is used as a new line character in most other non-Unix operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Symbian OS and others.

Source

Answer 2

Since there's no answer stating just this, summarized succinctly:

Carriage Return (MAC pre-OSX)

• CR
• \r
• ASCII code 13

Line Feed (Linux, MAC OSX)

• LF
• \n
• ASCII code 10

Carriage Return and Line Feed (Windows)

• CRLF
• \r\n
• ASCII code 13 and then ASCII code 10

If you see ASCII code in a strange format, they are merely the number 13 and 10 in a different radix/base, usually base 8 (octal) or base 16 (hexadecimal).

http://www.bluesock.org/~willg/dev/ascii.html

Answer 3

It's really just about which bytes are stored in a file. CR is a bytecode for carriage return (from the days of typewriters) and LF similarly, for line feed. It just refers to the bytes that are placed as end-of-line markers.

Way more information, as always, on wikipedia.

Answer 4

Systems based on ASCII or a compatible character set use either LF (Line feed, 0x0A, 10 in decimal) or CR (Carriage return, 0x0D, 13 in decimal) individually, or CR followed by LF (CR+LF, 0x0D 0x0A); These characters are based on printer commands: The line feed indicated that one line of paper should feed out of the printer, and a carriage return indicated that the printer carriage should return to the beginning of the current line.

Here is the details.

Answer 5

Jeff Atwood has a recent blog post about this: The Great Newline Schism

Here is the essence from Wikipedia:

The sequence CR+LF was in common use on many early computer systems that had adopted teletype machines, typically an ASR33, as a console device, because this sequence was required to position those printers at the start of a new line. On these systems, text was often routinely composed to be compatible with these printers, since the concept of device drivers hiding such hardware details from the application was not yet well developed; applications had to talk directly to the teletype machine and follow its conventions. The separation of the two functions concealed the fact that the print head could not return from the far right to the beginning of the next line in one-character time. That is why the sequence was always sent with the CR first. In fact, it was often necessary to send extra characters (extraneous CRs or NULs, which are ignored) to give the print head time to move to the left margin. Even after teletypes were replaced by computer terminals with higher baud rates, many operating systems still supported automatic sending of these fill characters, for compatibility with cheaper terminals that required multiple character times to scroll the display.

Answer 6

CR - ASCII code 13

LF - ASCII code 10.

Theoretically CR returns cursor to the first position (on the left). LF feeds one line moving cursor one line down. This is how in old days you controled printers and text-mode monitors. These characters are usually used to mark end of lines in text files. Different operating systems used different conventions. As you pointed out Windows uses CR/LF combination while pre-OSX Macs use just CR and so on.