Preserving line breaks, carriage returns with header

tedteeter

Greetings, July 4th 2015

I am attempting to utilize the header function while correctly formatting the header fields such as Content-Type etc! Oddly when I use force download irregardless of file read method I cannot preserve line breaks, carriage returns in files that retain such?...The download works fine!...Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Ted

dalecosp

Downloading from a Unix-like server and reading it with Windows by any chance?

tedteeter

That is exactly what I am doing!....the file is read off the server and appears fine with line breaks as needed!...however, upon reading from windows in an app such as notepad all the breaks are lost?...I've tried numerous combinations with extents to including "level=1" etc with text/plain and text/html...which I am unsure the significance of...any ideas?

Weedpacket

Notepad doesn't recognise linebreaks except Windows-style ones. Use a real text editor.

tedteeter

That is a great suggestion!....and indeed it does work!.....I was just hoping for a solution to appeal to the fact that the default text viewer is notepad!...Thanks for the response!

sneakyimp

If your source data files come from a *nix machine, chances are that they use just a single \n character as a line ending

$nix_line_ending = "\n";

One windows machines, notepad only interprets windows-style line endings as calling for a new line:

$windows_line_ending = "\r\n";

Why? convention I suppose.

You can either encourage folks to use a good text editor to read the file OR you can replace all the "\n" chars in your source files with "\r\n". Check [man]str_replace[/man].

tedteeter

Great!...thanks much for the help!....I wondered why one would include both !!

Weedpacket

Windows gets its convention from MS-DOS, which got it from CP/M, which got it from teletype machines, which needed to do two things to start a new line; Carriage Return to move the print head back to the start of the line, and Line Feed to move the paper up a line.

sneakyimp

Weedpacket;11048961 wrote:
Windows gets its convention from MS-DOS, which got it from CP/M, which got it from teletype machines, which needed to do two things to start a new line; Carriage Return to move the print head back to the start of the line, and Line Feed to move the paper up a line.

I always thought it was "because our fathers before us did it."

dalecosp

Nope; Weed's got his ASCII ducks all in a nice row up there (apparently his teletype didn't LF between ducks ...) 😃