For future reference, Notepad will only recognize "\r\n", not "\r" or "\n" alone. Also, use Wordpad or Notepad++ instead.
Further reading: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/vclanguage/thread/cba503b1-a0e2-4a64-a970-f735c5bc1c90 http://www.baanboard.com/baanboard/showthread.php?t=9069 On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 7:57 PM, Ken Irwin <kir...@wittenberg.edu> wrote: > Jonathan's questions were right on target. I was opening the files in the > standard MS Notepad editor, and it was not observing line breaks. When I went > to go open the files in MiniTab they were just fine. (Changing the files to > .txt and text/plain did *not* fix the problem in Notepad, and I do wonder > what it would take to make that program happy, but in this case it doesn't > much matter.) > > Thanks for the help > Ken > > -----Original Message----- > From: Code for Libraries [mailto:code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of > Jonathan Rochkind > Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 3:41 PM > To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU > Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] data export help: line breaks on tab-delimited > download > > line breaks don't appear when you view it with what software? > > Can you have your browser save it to disk after it prompts you to do so, > and open with a reliable text editor you know how to use and confirm if > \n is really still in the file or not? > > If you are viewing it in your web brower, then your web browser is > probably deciding to display it as HTML. The line breaks are probably > still there, the web browser is just displaying as HTML. Web browsers > aren't great places to view text. If you are viewing it after saving it > to disk, then your web browser probably won't know to display as text > unless the filename ends in ".txt". If you are viewing it without > saving to disk (but then why are you using > Content-Disposition:attachment?), then make sure you're still setting > the content-type appropriately; and you may need to make the filename > end in .txt anyway. > > The line breaks are probably still there, your web browser is just > rendering the file as html rather than txt, is my guess. > > On 1/11/2011 3:29 PM, Ken Irwin wrote: >> Hi all, >> >> I've got a dataset that I'm trying to make exportable for MiniTab, etc. It's >> tab-delimited and lines end with "\n". >> >> When I serve it up as "text/plain" and view it in my web browser, it works >> just fine and all the line breaks are in the right places. >> >> When I send the header to make it a downloadable "attachment": >> Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="categories.tab" >> Then there are no line breaks at all - it's all one line, and the >> line-breaks don't appear. >> >> I tried "\r" instead, and that didn't work either. >> >> Any idea what I might be doing wrong here? >> >> Thanks >> Ken >> >