Topic awaiting preservation: \n

Don't you love my descriptive title? Anyways... I've never had this problem before, but writing \n to a file is really not working, see the code below:


$news = $Title . "\n" . $date . "\n" . $Message;
$file = fopen("news.txt","a");
fwrite($file,$news);
fclose($file);

the variables all work fine and everything, but everywhere in the file where there's supposed to be a newline because of the \n there is a weird little box thing. I don't know why it's doing this and I can't remember ever having this problem before. Can anyone help?

kewl

Mad Scientist

Your title made me smile. =)

My *guess* about your problem: different operating systems treat newlines differently. Some use a carriage return character, some use a newline character, and some use both.

Perl treats "\n" as whatever the operating system that it's running on uses.

If you're running your perl script on one operating system (like on your server), and then opening the file in your native operating system (likely windows), and the file is being transferred as binary data (instead of ascii), then it's possible that your native operating system isn't understanding the server's operating system's newlines.

Just a guess.

Maninacan, the newline *characters* are stored in the file, but some editors (I guess that you tried to open that file in Notepad) won't show line endings correctly when they use Unix line endings - only "\n" (on Windows you have to use "\r\n" instead). Don't worry about this, line ending are there and you can see them if you open that file in a modern HTML/text editor...

BTW Slime, Maninacan posted PHP code, not PERL...

Well, I don't think either of you are right. First off, Slime, the Server and the Client are both running the same OS, in fact they are the same machine, so I doubt that's the problem. And secondly Max, I opened it in Editplus which is a modern text/html editor, and it still didn't show them as newlines, and I know there's a way to do it without doing \r\n because I've done it before. Hmmm... What to do, What to do.

kewl

Mad Scientist

Try to open it in my HTML editor ( http://www.maxworld.co.yu/htmlbeauty/ )...

Perl and PHP look similar =)

What OS are you running on?

And do you have a link to a sample file?
Actually they're both correct I bet the \n's are there.

You can always test this by reading the file and doing a \n search and replace





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