The End-of-Line Story (2004)

This goes back further.

Teletype machines needed a delay to move the printing apparatus back to the beginning of a line. The two characters provided that delay.

I never used one of these; I was too young.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33

https://www.revk.uk/2022/02/crlf-has-long-history.html?m=1

> This choice was designed to spread the pain equally among all operating systems of the day; each has to translate to and from the CR LF convention when text was transferred across the network.

This compromise might have made sense from a political or goodwill standpoint at the time. But it meant that everyone using these protocols would have to store, convert, or transmit the extra character forever.

I tried to post an homage to reading text that had LF without CR but the input filter helpfully corrected it. You will just have to imagine text moving down like a set of stairs descending from left to right.

Kermit was the file transfer protocol of last resort for sorting out weird translation issues. It was slow but super effective.

HN is +10 proof against ascii art.

It's pretty unfortunate that we ended up with system dependent newlines. This means that text files are not byte-for-byte the same across systems so comparisons or hashing need normalization. This also makes reliable line splitting less convenient. I was also bitten by FTP transferring binary files with text mode instead of binary mode, causing corruption.

Nowadays I tend to enforce LF everwhere. Windows can deal with it, and it ensures consistent cross platform handling. I know that Rust also uses a single LF on all platforms, not sure if there are other such languages.

Today it's a mistake to open files in "text mode" that translates between line endings, or otherwise save text files with any line ending that isn't LF. Even notepad opens files with LF line ending now. (while we're at it, save all text data in UTF-8 too)

Some "text protocols" have CR LF line endings but this should be relegated to a library; your own code shouldn't deal with this.

And then we can all forget this mistake

The irony of finding the formating of this article completely messed up on mobile is not lost on me.

so interesting. I've somehow always supposed that it was ms-dos that decided to be different.

Using curl in linux, I find it useful to delete \r. Makes it easier to use sed.

  while [ "$url" ]; do
    res=$(curl -i "$url" | tr -d '\r')
    headers=$(echo "$res" | sed '/^$/q')
    body=$(echo "$res" | sed '1,/^$/d')
    echo "$body"
    url=$(echo "$headers" | sed -n -E 's/link: <(.*)>; rel="next"/\1/pi')
  done

I posted this last year and was invited to repost it using the second chance pool. After posting it, I noticed someone else posted it yesterday.