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Asked: 2026-06-12T08:17:50+00:00

I was going thru some content about control characters especially newline character(will focus on

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I was going thru some content about control characters especially newline character(will focus on this).After going thru
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_characters, got to know that \n is the line character in unix
while it is \r\n in windows. Now i got the question how OS comes into picture when iterpreting
ASCII Codes becoz i was under impression when we type any given character on keyboard, any OS send the same
bits and editor interprets that bit and display the corresponding character. Looks like this understanding is
wrong, Because different bit is sent in case of unix(\n) and windows(\r\n) when we press ENTER(new line terminator).As per
new understanding if we press ENTER on diff OS(say unix and windows),different bits are sent to editor and its
responsibilty of text editor to show the typed stuff in new line keeping the underlying OS in picture.Please let me
know if my understanding is correct as this will help me to understand other basics also?

Next question is if above is correct, what can be the reason different OS treat some control characters differently
when they treat all other characters equally? Is it becoz specific bits are already reserved in specific OS?

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  1. Editorial Team

    How an application treats keyboard input varies a bit, actually. When you press return the application is under no obligation to actually generate LF or CR+LF anywhere. E.g. it might decide to just end the current paragraph object and start a new one (e.g. in a word processor). If it’s a Windows text editor then it will probably just write CR+LF into the file, while on Unix it just writes an LF.

    They keyboard itself is very, very far removed from things you see on the screen or even on the disk. This goes through scan codes, keyboard layouts and other transformations before it ends up as text or markup somewhere.

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