CRLF Madness
05-Jul-04
Found this article about the evil end-of-line madness between DOS/Windows, Unix and Mac text files. My favorite quote (actually from this article about the demise of the cent sign):
*60’s workhorse Teletype printers required two control characters to start a new line: a carriage return (ASCII code 13) to return the print head to the left margin, and a line feed (ASCII code 10) to roll the paper up a smidge. Over time, Unix computers standardized on line feed as its text file line delimiter; Macintosh computers went with carriage return. PC text files usually contain a matched CR/LF pair. Sigh.
So we’re still using standards developed for hardware created in the 60’s. Great. Brilliant.