Question

I have a stringbuilder object, that a line of data gets added to.

after each line gets added, I append a “\n” on the end to indicate a new line.

this stringbuilder object, finalised, gets written to a flat file.

When I open the flat file in notepad I get a small rectangle after every line and the column formatting is ruined.

When I open the flat file in wordpad, the new line is taken into consideration and the column formatting is perfect.

I have tried all ways I know of removing the new line entry before it gets written, but this removes the formatting when written to the flat file. I need the new line for the formatting of the columns.

how can I output the file with new lines but without using \n?

Answer 1

The Windows way of terminating a line is to use “\r\n”, not just “\n”.

You can find the “line separator for the current operating system” using the line.separator system property:

String lineSeparator = System.getProperty("line.separator");
...
StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
...
builder.append(lineSeparator);
...