line separator : Java Glossary

2007-10-10 by Roedy Green ©1996-2009 Canadian Mind Products
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line separator

aka line terminator, newline, carriage return. Different operating systems use different conventions to mark the ends of lines in text files. For example, Unix/Linux uses newline, nl, 10, 0x0a, '\n'. DOS/Win 3.1/W95/W98/Me/NT/W2K/XP/W2K3/Vista use carriage-return:line-feed, CrLf, 13:10, 0x0d 0x0a "\r\n" OSX uses carriage-return, Cr, 10, 0x0a '\r'.

If you use the readLine and println methods, Java automatically deals with the platform differences for you.

You can discover the magic line ending String with:

/** get the platform's String to mark the end of each line */
static final String lineSeparator = System.getProperty ( "line.separator" );

The last line in a file may or may not have a line separator.

binary formats
File
file separator
path separator
Platform specific file features
println format
readLine

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