Why does "\n" give a new line on Windows?

Question

The line-break marker on Windows should be CR+LF whereas on Unix, it's just LF.

So when I use something like Console.Write("line1\nline2");, why would it work "properly" and give me two lines? I expect this \n not to work, and only a combo of \r\n would work.

Answer 1

'\n' is the Line Feed character. Traditionally, it caused the printer to roll the paper up one line. '\r' is the Carriage Return character, which traditionally caused the printer head to move to the far left edge of the paper.

On printers and consoles that interpret the characters in this manner, the output of line1\nline2 would be

line1      line2 

Many consoles (and editors) will interpret '\n' to mean that you want to start a new line and position the cursor at the beginning of that new line. That is what you see here.

You should use Environment.NewLine rather than hard-coding any particular constants.

Answer 2

This is just the standard behaviour of the underlying Windows console. A native C app will do exactly the same if you output 0x0A to the console.

Of course, you should be using Environment.NewLine for your new lines. Environment.NewLine resolves to \r\n on Windows and \n on Unix like systems.