The Great Newline Schism
20th January 2010
Geek chic. If you find this article interesting (as I did), you probably need to Get A Life.
If you work with text files in any capacity — and what programmer doesn’t — you should know that not all newlines are created equally. The Great Newline Schism is something you need to be aware of. Make sure your tools can show you not just those pesky invisible white space characters, but line endings as well.
Indeed — got bit by that just yesterday; if you’re doing any kind of text matching, that can be one of the hardest bugs to track down because all that crap looks like a space in your normal viewing tools but it’s not a space.