What is newline character — '\n'

Question

This is a very basic concept, but something I have never been able to articulate that well. and I would like to try to spell it and see where I go wrong.

If I have to, how would I define a "newline character". say if I create a new file in unix(or windows), then does the file store the "end of line" information by inserting a special character in the file called as "new line character". If so, what is its ascii value? I remember that in C programs, I have checked for the read character against the value '\n' . And why this confusing 2 characters to represent end of line characters..

bash$ cat states
California
Massachusetts
Arizona

Say, I want to insert one line space between the lines and want an output of the form: Desired output:

California

Massachusetts

Arizona

bash$sed -e 's/\n/\n\n/g' states  does not work.

Why can't I treat "new line character" here just as I would treat any other character and run something like above command. (I understand that one might say that this is a matter of syntax of sed, but could one please explain the intuition behind not allowing this, so that I can get rid of my confusion.

Similarly, inside the vim editor, I can not use :%s/\n/\n\n/g . Why so?

Do I need to further escape \n by using a backslash in sed and from within vim?.

Thanks,

Jagrati

Answer 1

sed 's/$/\n/' states

Answer 2

NewLine (\n) is 10 (0xA) and CarriageReturn (\r) is 13 (0xD).

Different operating systems picked different end of line representations for files. Windows uses CRLF (\r\n). Unix uses LF (\n). Older Mac OS versions use CR (\r), but OS X switched to the Unix character.

Here is a relatively useful FAQ.

Answer 3

sed can be put into multi-line search & replace mode to match newline characters \n.

To do so sed first has to read the entire file or string into the hold buffer ("hold space") so that it then can treat the file or string contents as a single line in "pattern space".

To replace a single newline portably (with respect to GNU and FreeBSD sed) you can use an escaped "real" newline.

# cf. http://austinmatzko.com/2008/04/26/sed-multi-line-search-and-replace/
echo 'California
Massachusetts
Arizona' | 
sed -n -e '
# if the first line copy the pattern to the hold buffer
1h
# if not the first line then append the pattern to the hold buffer
1!H
# if the last line then ...
$ {
# copy from the hold to the pattern buffer
g
# double newlines
s/\n/\
\
/g
s/$/\
/
p
}'

# output
# California
#
# Massachusetts
#
# Arizona
#

There is, however, a much more convenient was to achieve the same result:

echo 'California
Massachusetts
Arizona' | 
   sed G

Answer 4

Escape characters are dependent on whatever system is interpreting them. \n is interpreted as a newline character by many programming languages, but that doesn't necessarily hold true for the other utilities you mention. Even if they do treat \n as newline, there may be some other techniques to get them to behave how you want. You would have to consult their documentation (or see other answers here).

For DOS/Windows systems, the newline is actually two characters: Carriage Return (ASCII 13, AKA \r), followed by Line Feed (ASCII 10). On Unix systems (including Mac OSX) it's just Line Feed. On older Macs it was a single Carriage Return.

Answer 5

I think this post by Jeff Attwood addresses your question perfectly. It takes you through the differences between newlines on Dos, Mac and Unix, and then explains the history of CR (Carriage return) and LF (Line feed).

Answer 6

From the sed man page:

Normally, sed cyclically copies a line of input, not including its terminating newline character, into a pattern space, (unless there is something left after a "D" function), applies all of the commands with addresses that select that pattern space, copies the pattern space to the standard output, appending a newline, and deletes the pattern space.

It's operating on the line without the newline present, so the pattern you have there can't ever match. You need to do something else - like match against $ (end-of-line) or ^ (start-of-line).

Here's an example of something that worked for me:

$ cat > states
California
Massachusetts
Arizona
$ sed -e 's/$/\
> /' states
California

Massachusetts

Arizona

I typed a literal newline character after the \ in the sed line.