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I'd like to know the difference (with examples if possible) between CR LF (Windows), LF (Unix) and CR (Macintosh) line break types.
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CR = Carriage Return ( \r , 0x0D in hexadecimal, 13 in decimal) — moves the cursor to the beginning of the line without advancing to the next line. LF = Line Feed ( \n , 0x0A in hexadecimal, 10 in decimal) — moves the cursor down to the next line without returning to the beginning of the line.
Whereas Windows follows the original convention of a carriage return plus a line feed ( CRLF ) for line endings, operating systems like Linux and Mac use only the line feed ( LF ) character. The history of these two control characters dates back to the era of the typewriter.
Description. The term CRLF refers to Carriage Return (ASCII 13, \r ) Line Feed (ASCII 10, \n ). They're used to note the termination of a line, however, dealt with differently in today's popular Operating Systems.
At the bottom right of the screen in VS Code, click the little button that says LF or CRLF . After changing it to your preference, Voila, the file you're editing now has the correct line breaks.
CR and LF are control characters, respectively coded 0x0D (13 decimal) and 0x0A (10 decimal).
They are used to mark a line break in a text file. As you indicated, Windows uses two characters the CR LF sequence; Unix only uses LF and the old MacOS ( pre-OSX MacIntosh) used CR.
An apocryphal historical perspective:
As indicated by Peter, CR = Carriage Return and LF = Line Feed, two expressions have their roots in the old typewriters / TTY. LF moved the paper up (but kept the horizontal position identical) and CR brought back the "carriage" so that the next character typed would be at the leftmost position on the paper (but on the same line). CR+LF was doing both, i.e. preparing to type a new line. As time went by the physical semantics of the codes were not applicable, and as memory and floppy disk space were at a premium, some OS designers decided to only use one of the characters, they just didn't communicate very well with one another ;-)
Most modern text editors and text-oriented applications offer options/settings etc. that allow the automatic detection of the file's end-of-line convention and to display it accordingly.
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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.
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