Newline character in C other than \n? [closed] - c

Question

Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
This question does not appear to be about programming within the scope defined in the help center.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
Is there a replacement of \n in C? Can I jump to next line without using \n? I came across this question and I cannot seem to figure out a way..
#include < stdio.h>
void main()
{
printf("A");
printf("B");
}
I want it to print
A
B
And not
AB
But I cannot use \n.

Answer 1

You can use puts("A"); puts("B");.

Answer 2

To output \n without writing \n you could simply printf("%c",10);, or char c=10;write(1,&c,1);, or 100 other ways to output ascii 10.
But if you would like to avoid the newline character completely, the answer varies. It's not C or your code that actually decides to go to a new line, but whatever the device is that displays your output.
E.g. a terminal, or a line printer, or a web browser showing html.
Suppose you are outputting to a browser, the answer would be <br>
If you are outputting to an xterm terminal, \033[1B moves the cursor one line down. The output a carriage return \r to move to the beginning of the line.
So for example:
printf("test\033[1B\r123");
will output (in an xterm)
test
123

Answer 3

As an alternative to puts(), you can use the octal equivalent of \n: \012.
E.g.
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("A\012");
printf("B\012");
return 0;
}

Answer 4

\n means "new line". \rmeans "carriage return". These characters have their origin from old form-feed printers, which needed both, one to advance the paper to a new line, one to return the carriage with the print head to the start of the line.
Different OS-es have uses different combinations of the two to indicate a new line in text:
Unix (and Linux, Mac OSX, etc) uses only \n
Windows uses \r\n
Mac OS up to version 9 uses only \r
There is no canonical platform-independent way in the C standard libraries to represent the "System"'s newline/carriage return character. However, many other languages and/or libraries have implemented this, e.g:
Java: System.getProperty("line.separator")
.NET: System.Environment.NewLine
However, if you have an output stream open on a text file, the standard C libraries should translate \n to whatever is necessary to indicate a new line on the current system.

Answer 5

I'd simply use:
printf("A%cB",10);

Answer 6

In C the escape sequence \n represents a character that belongs to the basic execution character set.
In particular, one can be sure that a new-line character exists when our C programs are running.
More important: \n is mapped to 1 and only 1 character, whose code is a positive integer number in the range of the type char.
However, the behaviour of the display devices can produce other results.
For example, when we send a character \n to a text file under Windows, this is replaced by the sequence of two characters \x0D\x0A (LF+CR, that is: Line Feed + Carriage Return).
The standard C99 or C11 says:
(5.2.2) \n (new line) Moves the active position to the initial position of the next line.
The meaning of that (in every system that prints several lines in its standard display device), the "effect" of sending a character \n is "advance to the next line" and "go to the beginning of that line". It is the sum of "line feed" and "carriage return" operations.
In DOS/Windows this is equivalent to send the sequence of these two characters: '\xD', '\xA'.
In Linux/Unix this is equivalent to send the only character '\xD'.
More details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline
Summarizing, we have to distinguish betwenn the character \n by itself, and the semantic related to \n when is considered as a control character in C.
You can "produce" a new line just by sending the character '\n' with putc() or printf().
By using \n is the better way to do that.
Another very good alternative is that pointed out by #1'': to use the function puts(str).
This function appends a new-line at the end of the string str.
I think is not at all a good idea to try this other alternatives:
printf("%c", 10); // 10 == 0x0A
printf("%c", 13); // 10 == 0x0D
printf("\x0A"); // CR
printf("\x0D"); // LF
You are not solving the problem properly, because your program becomes system dependent.
Valid for Windows, Linux or what?
Worst: in theory, the standard C does not ensures that you even have correspondence between the ASCII/Unicode code numbers for the characters and the characters used in the system your program will run. This issue involves to the control characters, too.
So, you cannot be sure that 0x10 means "carriage return" and 0x13 means "line feed".
To be sure of that, it is necessary to check the existence of the following macro:
__STDC_ISO_10646__
(That macro, if exists, is a long int number containing information about the version of Unicode supported by your compiler.)
The important thing is: if the macro __STDC_ISO_10646__ is not defined, you cannot have certainty about the codes assigned to the characters in your system.
Thus, it cannot be used the "magic numbers" 10 and 13.