On 13Jun2008 22:42, Gene Heskett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: | Before this gets too far off the track, I wanted to replace the single $0D with | a single $0A. And yes, I'm aware that dos used both characters, which I hate | to admit is the actual right way to do it.
You're right to hate it, because it is the wrong way to do it. Using two characters as a line delimiter is mad, because it introduces parsing ambiguity (what should a bare \r or \n mean? What about \n\r? etc). The two character delimiter is a holdover from naively coded systems that wanted to dump text files direct to printers without any translation, so a carriage return and a line feed were needed to manipulate the printer head. Which is just daft in a data storage format. That the IETF internet text protocols use CR+NL as line delimiters is a compatibility thing, not a recommendation. A line _should_ be terminated by a single character. What that character is is a somewhat arbitrary choice, given that the ASCII table doesn't have an end-of-line (EOL) character, just CR and LF and ASCII was what was there the play with. UNIX went with NL, OS/9 and Macs went with CR, and DOS went with "I'm too dumb to translate text delimiters into printer control actions", thus its CR/NL overspeak. Cheers, -- Cameron Simpson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> DoD#743 http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/ Microsoft: Where do you want to go today? UNIX: Been there, done that! -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
