English

Noun

newline ‎(plural newlines)

1. (computing) The character or character sequence that indicates the end of a line of text and transition to the next line; or, a control code or escape sequence used in a programming language to denote this character.

   • Microsoft Windows uses CRLF for newline.

   • 1959, Association for Computing Machinery, Communications of the ACM (ACM Digital Library) Page 599

     The ugly part is the quote marks on two adjacent lines that mean a newline character.

   • 1987, T. D. Brown, C for Basic Programmers Page 13

     The calculator program starts off by printing the string "0\n", that is, it prints a zero and then moves to a newline.

   • 2002, Laura Lemay, Rafe Colburn, Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days, Page 69

     Unlike in C, you don't have to loop through the output and watch every character to make sure it's a newline; Perl will keep track of that for you.

   • 2002, Allen B. Downey, Jeffrey Elkner and Chris Meyers, How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python

     It contains only a single statement, which outputs a newline character. (That's what happens when you use a print command without any arguments.)

   • 2006, Jeffrey E.F. Friedl, Mastering Regular Expressions Page 111

     The original Unix regex tools worked on a line-by-line basis, so the thought of matching a newline wasn't an issue until the advent of sed and lex.

Synonyms

• line break
• end-of-line

See also

• control code
• control character
• escape character
• escape sequence