Does Windows carriage return \r\n consist of two characters or one character?

Question

Windows carriage return is \r\n while it is \n in Unix, is \r\n treated as two characters?

Answer 1

These are two characters:

• \r is carriage return;
• \n is line feed.

Two characters combined represent a new line on Windows. Whereas on Linux, \n represents new line. It moves cursor to the start of new line on Linux. On Windows, the cursor will stay at the same column in the console but on the next line.

\r on Linux has the same effect as on Windows: moves cursor to the start of the line. It is possible to print different information on the same line where \r is used instead of \n.

Answer 2

Actually \r is 0x0D (^M) and \n is 0x0A (^J), but..... on windows:

\n will write 0x0D 0x0A

on unix:

\r will write 0x0D
\n will write 0x0A

Answer 3

Depends on the setting. \r\n is two bytes wide (in ASCII, UTF-8, etc.), but I/O libraries such C's stdio library and others, when operating in text mode, may translate between \n and \r\n quasi-transparently.

I.e., on a Windows platform, a C program reading a text-mode stream txt_in with

while ((c = getc(txt_in)) != EOF)
    printf("%02x\n", c);

will not report the ASCII code for \r. Conversely, putc('\n', txt_out) will actually write \r\n to the text-mode stream txt_out.

Answer 4

Windows doesn't distinguish between \r\n and any other two characters. However, there is one situation where it is treated as one character: if you use the C runtime and open a file as text, \r\n in the file will be read as \n, and \n will be written to the file as \r\n.

Answer 5

Yes, it's two characters: carriage return '\r' followed by linefeed '\n'.