Question

Currently, to represent a newline in go programs, I use \n. For example:

package main

import "fmt"


func main() {
    fmt.Printf("%d is %s \n", 'U', string(85))
}

… will yield 85 is U followed by a newline.

However, this doesn’t seem all that cross-platform. Looking at other languages, PHP represents this with a global constant ( PHP_EOL ). Is \n the right way to represent newlines in a cross-platform specific manner in go / golang?

Answer 1

I got curious about this so decided to see what exactly is done by fmt.Println. http://golang.org/src/pkg/fmt/print.go

If you scroll to the very bottom, you’ll see an if addnewline where \n is always used. I can’t hardly speak for if this is the most “cross-platform” way of doing it, and go was originally tied to linux in the early days, but that’s where it is for the std lib.

I was originally going to suggest just using fmt.Fprintln and this might still be valid as if the current functionality isn’t appropriate, a bug could be filed and then the code would simply need to be compiled with the latest Go toolchain.